This article was first published on the 11th of May, 2020 by Patrick Carpen.
Last updated: May 11, 2020 at 23:10 pm
The fact that Brazil has misdiagnosed a coronavirus case as Malaria highlights Brazil’s incompetency in fighting the COVID-19. It is no surprise then that Brazil has one of the highest coronavirus infection and death rates in the world.
The Story
For some days around the 4th of May, 2020, a man living in the Brazilian municipality of Bonfim hadn’t been feeling well. He had high fever, nausea and diarrhea. He was diagnosed in Brazil with malaria. However, his condition deteriorated, and in a desperate bid to save his life, on the evening of May 8th, 2020, his friends took him over the border illegally to neighboring Guyana to the Lethem Region Hospital in Region 9, Guyana, South America.
The Brazilian municipality of Bonfim borders the Guyanese town of Lethem. Guyana and Brazil share a river border to the south of Guyana at Lethem, Region 9. Due to the high number of coronavirus cases in Brazil, authorities have closed the Lethem/Bonfim border. There have been, as of the 11th of May, 2020 about one hundred confirmed cases of coronavirus in the State of Roraima in Brazil – the state which borders with Region 9, Guyana. On the other hand, only a few days ago, there have been zero coronavirus case in Region 9 Guyana.
All that changed when the infected man, not knowing that he was infected, but suspected to be infected, was transported across the Guyana/Brazil border into Lethem, Region 9 and taken to the Lethem Regional Hospital.
At first, the man informed the doctors that he had malaria, and the malaria team attended to him – without gloves or other protective gear – because, the border being closed with Brazil, they had no idea that he had crossed illegally and come over from Bonfim – a coronavirus hotspot.
It didn’t take long for the Guyanese doctors at the Lethem Regional Hospital to suspect that this might be a coronavirus case. The man was quickly placed into an isolation facility and the next day, samples were taken and sent for testing in Georgetown.
On the 10th of May, 2020, when I spoke to a staff who worked in the malaria department at the Lethem Regional Hospital, he said that he believed that the test would most likely come back positive for coronavirus. At that point, I become worried. This was a man who treated malaria patients regularly, and therefore is someone who “knows the difference.”
Not surprisingly, as was predicted, on the 11th of May, 2020, the test results came back from Georgetown positive for COVID-19. The infected man has been put in an isolation facility and backward tracing has been done to quarantine all those who came in contact with the infected man, as well as their families.
This one case study, as I mentioned earlier, highlights Brazil’s incompetence in fighting COVID-19, their outright lack of resolve or their ignorance of the gravity of this pandemic that the world is facing right now.
To put things into perspective, Brazil, a country on whose healthcare system I would have not so long ago bet my last dollar, has 168,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as we speak, while neighboring Venezuela, which is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, only has 422.
Related: Coronavirus Report by Country
