COVID-19

On February 26, a São Paulo resident returning from a trip to Italy became Brazil's first confirmed case of COVID-19. At that time, there had been 80,000 reported cases of infection and 2,700 deaths worldwide.

In March, with the number of infections growing, governors in various states adopted stricter measures to stop the virus spreading. These included closing public and private schools, and shutting down commercial premises.

Users of the city's public transport system wear masks for protection at the Grajaú bus terminal in São Paulo's South Zone.

The first COVID-19 death in Brazil was a 62-year-old man, who died in São Paulo on March 19, 2020. His death came just nine days after the World Health Organization recognized the global nature of the threat and officially upgraded COVID-19 to a pandemic.

On June 8, 2020, the newspapers Folha de São Paulo, UOL, O Estado de São Paulo, O Globo, and Extra set up CVI, a media consortium to publicize statistics about the pandemic.

The consortium's aims were a direct response to the federal government's decision to limit disclosure about COVID-19 figures.

At the end of September 2020, Brazil's Butantan Institute and the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac—manufacturer of the CoronaVac vaccine—signed a contract with the São Paulo government to supply 46 million doses of the vaccine by December.

At federal level, the president released 2.5 billion Brazilian reais (around 470 million US dollars at the time) to join the COVAX Facility, an international consortium set up as part of a World Health Organization initiative to facilitate global access to COVID-19 vaccines. In the meantime, the government lacked any national plan to halt the virus.

In November, Brazil's Federal Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) asked the national government for an effective plan to contain the virus. The following month, the Ministry of Health delivered its National COVID-19 Vaccination Plan to the court.

January 17, 2021: the first person to receive the vaccine in Brazil, nurse Monica Calazans, with São Paulo governor João Doria, at the conference center at the Clinical Hospital of the University of São Paulo Medical School in the state capital.

The 54-year-old nurse was vaccinated minutes after the emergency use of CoronaVac was approved by the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa). The first people to receive the vaccines would be health workers and the elderly.

On April 27, 2021, the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito), made up of 11 Members of Congress, launched its investigation into the Bolsonaro government's actions and failings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the topics covered by the inquiry was the purchase of medicines such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. These products lacked any scientifically proven effectiveness against the virus, yet the federal government spent 126.5 million Brazilian reais (around 23 million US dollars at the time) on purchasing them, and encouraged people to use them.

On April 8, 2021, 4,249 people died from COVID-19 in Brazil. However, in early May, research led by the Federal University of Pelotas indicated a drop of more than 50% in deaths among the elderly, due to the vaccination program that had started in January.

On January 17, the inland São Paulo municipality of Serrana, with an estimated population of 45,000, was the first in Brazil to start a mass vaccination program against COVID-19. The initiative was part of a clinical study by the Butantan Institute called Project S.

Four months later, the study revealed that the number of deaths had fallen by 95%, the number of symptomatic sufferers by 80%, and the number of hospitalized patients by 86%.

On September 15, the Butantan Institute delivered 50 million doses of the CoronaVac vaccine to the Ministry of Health's National Immunization Program. It was the last of the 100 million doses provided as agreed between the institute and the federal government.

In November, the World Health Organization identified a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron, which had been detected in South Africa. In July, the Delta variant was identified in India and this became the predominant strain in the city of São Paulo.

On January 14, 2022, the São Paulo government started vaccinating children aged 5 to 11 against COVID-19. The first Brazilian child to be vaccinated was an 8-year-old Indigenous boy, Davi Seremramiwe Xavante.

Born in a Xavante Indigenous village in Mato Grosso State, Davi had been in São Paulo for a year, receiving treatment for a genetic disorder at the Clinical Hospital's Children's Institute (Instituto da Criança). He received his vaccination at the Clinical Hospital with Governor João Doria looking on.

At the end of June 2022, figures published by the media consortium CVI revealed 670,000 deaths, 32 million confirmed cases of the disease, and a moving average of 208 deaths per day in Brazil—an increase compared to the average figure of 200 deaths for the previous three months.

With a 78.3% growth in the number of recorded new cases of the virus, Brazil was about to face its fourth wave of the disease.