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After more than six months, the new coronavirus reached 645 cities in the state of São Paulo. Santa Mercedes, in the extreme west of São Paulo, entered the newsletter of the State Health Department on Sunday (30), with the confirmation of a case.
Between the first case, registered in the capital on February 26, and the last municipality to have a registered case, today 803,404 people were infected and 29,978 died throughout the state, according to official data.
The São Paulo pandemic is one of the most serious in the world. If it is a country, the state would be the fifth most affected in number of cases, only behind the United States, Brazil, India and Russia, according to figures from the WHO (World Health Organization). Organizational records can take up to two days, but are used as a parameter during the pandemic.
The new coronavirus left the capital ten days after the first registration. On March 7, he arrived in Santana de Paranaíba, in Greater São Paulo. A month later and the disease had already taken over the entire metropolitan region, Baixada Santista, on the coast, and its internalization was progressing.
However, the interior took more than three months to reach the capital in number of cases, with 166,000 infections in each region on July 20.
The interior would surpass São Paulo two days later, reaching 170,515 infected, almost 3,000 more cases than the capital.
As the virus spread across the state, the capital watched the pandemic fade. Since June 24, new cases have decreased in the city.
São Paulo’s roads spread the virus
Experts believe that the coronavirus landed in Brazil through the airports of São Paulo, probably Guarulhos International, in Greater São Paulo. From there, it spread through the municipalities and crossed states on highways.
“The epidemic in Brazil began in centers with high demographic density and began to circulate in the capitals probably during Carnival. Then it began to spread through the road network, with internalization at the end of April”, says the coordinator of the scientific committee of the Northeast Consortium. , Miguel Nicolelis, who looked at the covid-19 in São Paulo.
As São Paulo is the largest highway hub in the country, it brought the virus from the capital to the interior and to much of Brazil.
Miguel Nicolelis, researcher
The spread through highways is one of the reasons indicated by Nicolelis for the high rates of pandemic in the city of Santos, “a region of very high flow.”
Was it possible to avoid it?
Nicolelis believes that the main “diffusion arteries” were BR-101, inland, and BR-116, which connects the southeast with the northeast along the coast.
“The virus ended up in the cities that line these highways,” he says. “But all roads contributed: the virus was spreading cases through Castelo Branco, Dutra, Bandeirantes, Anhanguera. From there, community transmission began in the interior.”
For the researcher, the pandemic in Brazil could have caused fewer victims if the state government and municipalities had placed sanitary barriers on the roads.
“The authorities should have provided sanitary barriers, blocking non-essential traffic such as intercity buses and passenger cars, as did Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus in China,” he says. This was allied with the active search for cases and adequate social isolation ”.
São Paulo lacked strategy. The state was one of the main, if not the main, responsible for the spread of the virus. By reducing the flow, infections would also have been less
Miguel Nicolelis, researcher
Wanted, the state government did not respond to questions from the Twitter about this theme.
On July 23, the Secretary of State for Health, Jean Gorinchteyn, said that the internalization of the pandemic was due in part to the “trivialization” of the cities of the interior and the relief of the quarantine.
“We, as doctors, have already pointed out the trivialization of measures by some cities in the interior of São Paulo, which ignored what was happening mainly in the municipality of São Paulo,” he said.
