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RIO – Public employee Jeniffer Pereira Melgaço, 28, resisted for six months to reveal her name. One of the reasons was the fact that he was the first person to be diagnosed with Covid-19 in the state of Rio. For a long time, he faced prejudice and became the victim of attacks on social networks. Jeniffer lives in the city of Barra Mansa, in Sul Fluminense, where she was born.
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She, who is a lawyer and works in the town hall, contracted the disease during a trip with her husband through the Lombardy region of Italy. On social media, she was accused of bringing the disease to Brazil. After six months, a lot has changed. The municipality has already registered 1,822 cases of the disease, 120 people have died from the virus. Jeniffer had a mild case of Covid-19, but to this day she has not regained her sense of smell.
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– In the first month, I still felt tired during the day and sometimes headaches. Today, six months after the positive, I continue to suffer a total loss of smell and a change in taste. It has been a difficult period of adaptation and seeking treatment, but without results until then – reports Jeniffer.
Loss of smell and taste is identified today as one of the main symptoms of the disease. So much so that the Ministry of Health began to determine that people who present these symptoms will appear in the statistics, without the need to perform the specific test.
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Fabrizio Romano, president of the Brazilian Academy of Rhinology (ABR), said that little is known about these sequelae. According to him, patients usually regain their sense of smell in a short time:
– Most improve, but we noticed that in less than 5% of people the problem persists for months. Treatment is with physical therapy (usually with exposure to strong odors) and medications. The patient must be persistent. Physical therapy must be done for months. It is a long-lasting treatment. In this case of Covid-19, a recent illness, we still don’t know what will happen.
Attacks on social media
Jeniffer Melgaço believes that the attacks suffered on social networks are mainly caused by people’s ignorance of the disease. The comments were very bad. Some even went so far as to say that the lawyer should have died. They called her irresponsible for bringing the new coronavirus to the country:
– I think that among so many news of deaths and city closures, ignorance of the virus, as forms of contagion, symptoms, causes fear. With that, they created some rumors, mostly false. So I understand the reaction of some people. After all, I was scared too. New cases do not go through the same exposure as me. Which, without a doubt, is positive. Perhaps because people have become accustomed to the virus, however, it is worrying not to attribute the disease to its seriousness and to abandon basic measures to avoid contamination – the lawyer evaluates.
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Upon discovering that she had been infected with the new coronavirus, Jeniffer Melgaço felt fear, like anyone else. But when she realized she had mild symptoms, she had another concern:
– During the first days, the possibility of having infected someone was what distressed me. The people who contacted me prior to the diagnosis were tested, and all were negative. Of course, I am very grateful to be alive, to have had a mild form of the disease, but my greatest thanks was not to have contaminated my family and friends.
The maid and her husband, a businessman from the city, went to Europe on February 10. In the initial itinerary, the Lombardy region in Italy, which was the epicenter of the disease in the country. During the tour, she could see that the disease was serious. When she found out she had been infected, she was terrified:
– I was very scared. I remember seeing one of the cities that I visited transporting corpses to other cities as they could no longer bear the death toll. The lack of treatment for everyone, entire cities closed, a really scary scenario. Unfortunately, today I am not afraid when I see the daily death figures. The way I feel has changed, because we have lived this reality for six months. However, I think we cannot get used to deaths. There are more than 890 thousand fatal cases in the world, this cannot be the “new normal”.
Even after healing, Jeniffer Melgaço says she takes all the care:
– I do not go out without a mask, I take care of hygiene and avoid crowds. We are not sure about the possibility of reinfection. I definitely don’t want to get infected again. I know that nobody chooses to get sick, but if we now know the measures to avoid, following the recommendations is the least to do.
