The Brazilian government announced on Thursday that the arrival of COVID-19 in the country was in January, more than a month before what was believed so far.
In a press interview, the Secretary of Health Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Wanderson Oliveira, said that investigations carried out by the folder detected that the first death from the new coronavirus in Brazil occurred on January 23.
Until then, the first positive coronavirus case had been announced on February 26: a 61-year-old man who lives in São Paulo, and who had returned from a trip to Italy. At the time, another 20 cases were being investigated and 59 suspicions were dismissed.
According to Oliveira, the discovery is the result of a ” retrospective investigation ” of hospitalized patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome. This category includes most hospitalizations for common flu, but it also covers the cases of COVID-19 .
The patient who is now considered the first victim of the new coronavirus in Brazil was a 75-year-old woman, resident in the state of Minas Gerais (southeast). The ministry did not provide further details.
Due to the discovery, the Secretary of Health Surveillance stated that “there was already an initial circulation of cases by the end of January 2020, obviously as imported cases”.
Oliveira recalled that the change in the date that marked the confirmation of the first case of COVID-19 also occurred with the Zika virus.
“This was also done on the Zika virus. Initially we thought that the first cases were from April 2015, and a year later, with retrospective investigation , we found that there was a case of Zika virus identified in a blood bank in the Amazon region since April 2014” , commented the secretary.
Brazil is the Latin American country most affected by COVID-19 . According to the latest balance released by the government, there are 299 deaths and 7,910 confirmed cases of the virus in the country.
