Two years ago, the first victim of Covid-19 in Brazil died

Two years ago, on March 12, 2020, Brazil recorded the first death from Covid-19, of a 57-year-old woman, who died a day after being admitted to a municipal hospital in the east of São Paulo.

The day before her death, the day worker Rosana Urbano had left her house at around 4 am in Cidade Tiradentes (east zone) and had traveled 25 km to see her mother, Gertrudes, who was hospitalized with pneumonia at the Hospital Municipal Doutor Cármino Caricchio, in Tatuapé.

Diabetic and hypertensive, when she learned that her mother was intubated, she felt sick and was hospitalized in the same place. She died at 7:15 pm on March 12, after a cardiac arrest. Gertrude died three days after her daughter. Rosana left three children and her husband, a cleaning assistant.

Recognition of Rosana’s death as the first in Brazil only took place in June. Until then, the first Brazilian case was considered to be another one registered on March 17 in a private hospital in the capital of São Paulo.

Since then, the country has had more than 654,000 deaths and more than 29.3 million people have been infected by Sars-CoV-2 since the beginning of the pandemic. Moving averages of deaths and infections continue to decline compared to data from two weeks ago. The number of deaths now stands at 467 per day, down 35%. The average number of cases is 46,895, a reduction of 44%.

This Friday, the daily moving average of deaths fell from 501 to 471 (-34.4%) compared to 14 days ago. There are almost 30 million positive cases.

As a result of the reduction and advancement of vaccination, several Brazilian capitals began to make the use of masks in public environments more flexible.

This Friday (11), the municipal secretary of Health of Rio de Janeiro, Daniel Soranz, said that Covid-19 can already be considered an endemic disease. For him, without new variants of the coronavirus, the scenario will be “much more normal”.

The secretary’s speech is similar to the position of the Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, who started to treat as a priority downgrading the status of Covid-19 from a pandemic (when there is a global health emergency) to endemic (stage of coexistence with the virus). , with a stable number of cases and deaths).

The withdrawal of a pandemic character restricts public and exceptional measures to combat the disease.

experts heard by sheet two weeks ago they disagreed with the assessment of the secretary and the minister. According to them, this does not mean that Covid-19 will not pass into the endemic phase, but we are just not there yet.