Connection between Covid-19 and country’s globe-trotting elite highlights gulf between rich and poor in one of world’s most unequal societies

It is Brazil’s most exclusive club – a beachside sanctuary of privilege and power to which just 0.00041% of the country’s citizens have the keys.

But the Rio de Janeiro Country Club – founded by British executives in 1916 and frequented since by the crème de la crème of carioca society – has been thrown into mourning by the coronavirus pandemic, sparking a nationwide debate about class and inequality in one of the most economically lopsided societies on earth.

At least 60 of the club’s 850 globe-trotting members have reportedly been struck down with Covid-19, while one – the septuagenarian businesswoman Mirna Bandeira de Mello – has died and been laid to rest during a funeral attended by no one but her son.

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“In normal times there would have been millions at her burial,” Christiano Bandeira de Mello lamented in an interview with the Brazilian magazine Época.

Anna Maria Ramalho, a society columnist who had known the victim since school, said she had been forced to say goodbye by logging on to an online mass. “I’ve lost a life-long friend,” she said. “She was such a special person, so very down-to-earth.”

Coronavirus appears to have breached the country club’s white wooden gates – just metres from Ipanema beach – on the afternoon of 7 March – although exactly how is now a topic of bitter dispute.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ipanema beach is deserted after Rio de Janeiro’s governor ordered residents to stay away from the beaches. Photograph: Nicoló Lanfranchi/The Guardian

Hours earlier, descendants of Brazil’s former royal family had gathered at a nearby mansion to toast the engagement of 31-year-old Pedro Alberto de Orléans e Bragança – the great-great-great grandson of Brazil’s last emperor, Pedro II – and his 26-year-old partner, Alessandra Fragoso Pires.

Guests included Pires’ mother and stepfather, who had jetted in from their home in London, and others from Belgium, Italy and the United States.

More than half of the 70-or-so people at the lunch have since tested positive for Covid-19 including the bride’s father and grandfather and the groom’s aunt. Three remain in hospital, in serious condition. “It’s just horrible,” said one family member who attended the celebration and asked not to be named. “Nobody could have imagined the virus would strike with such devastating force.”

After lunch, several guests spent the afternoon at the “country” – sparking speculation they had caused its coronavirus cluster – something strenuously denied by one friend of Brazil’s former monarchy. “One thing has nothing to do with the other,” they insisted. “Nobody knows what happened – who brought it [the virus] and who didn’t. They were surprised by this.”

Whatever the truth, two days later on 9 March, coronavirus continued to contaminate the club’s illustrious membership. At a packed assembly – reportedly convened to thrash out a dispute between its old guard and a new generation of associates who lack the traditional surnames of past members, but not their deep pockets – cross words, and then kisses and hugs were exchanged.

“Lots of people lost their fortunes in the financial crisis – people who were stinking rich and ended up with nothing – so they had to sell their membership,” one prominent Rio socialite said of the generational tug-of-war at the club where members are chosen by secret ballot and it costs around £70,000 to join.

The 270-strong audience also included people who were at the imperial family’s commemoration – further fueling suspicions they were to blame for the outbreak.

“It was a tense meeting, big names in business were there,” the high-society source said. “Several people left the meeting infected.”

The country club is not the only oasis of Brazilian prosperity and influence touched by coronavirus. A pop star, an actress and the daughter of a top government official were infected during a celebrity wedding at a beach resort that boasts of being “conceived with the philosophy of exclusiveness”. Some affluent guests had reportedly flown in from holidays in Europe and Aspen, Colorado.

Brazil’s presidential palace has also been hit, with more than 20 members of a delegation that flew to meet Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate testing positive for Covid-19. The president, Jair Bolsonaro, claims he tested negative but has refused to make those results public.

The connection between the spread of coronavirus and Brazil’s super-rich has sparked discussion over their role in introducing the ailment to Brazil – and the gulf between rich and poor in one of the most unequal societies on earth.

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Many fear that while the first coronavirus wave has crashed over Brazil’s largely white political and economic elite, it is the poor and mostly black masses who will eventually suffer the most – without the luxury of being able to self-isolate at home or resort to expensive private hospitals.

One of the first deaths recorded in Brazil was that of Cleonice Gonçalves, a 63-year-old domestic helper who was reportedly infected by her wealthy employer when she returned from holiday in Italy. “It goes without saying that the most vulnerable will always be the most affected, irrespective of whether there is a pandemic or not,” the black feminist intellectual Djamila Ribeiro wrote in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper recently. “These are structural issues.”

Others, including some country club members, wonder whether some of Brazil’s mega-moneyed coronavirus patients exposed others to the illness by failing to properly isolate or quarantine themselves – perhaps believing their economic status meant they were above such mundane measures.

One Brazilian tycoon is reportedly being investigated by police for allegedly flying his private jet to the beach last month despite having tested positive for Covid-19. The man – an investment banker who denies the charges – is accused of infecting at least two locals in Trancoso, a glamorous seaside town in Bahia state.

Rio de Janeiro – which has so far suffered 1074 coronavirus cases and 47 deaths – has been in lockdown since late March, forcing a succession of high-society soirées to be scrapped.

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Among the aborted events was a bash for 1,000 people at the beachfront Copacabana Palace hotel to celebrate the marriage of Alexandre Birman, a multi-millionaire footwear designer who makes crocodile and snakeskin shoes for Hollywood stars.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police officers patrol Ipanema beach, amid the coronavirus lockdown. Photograph: Lucas Landau/Reuters

A confidant of the Orléans e Bragança family said they had more pressing concerns with two relatives still in intensive care. “They feel sad, apprehensive and worried … They are frightened with all this repercussion,” they said.

Some have pointed an accusing finger at Brazil’s jet-setting elites for importing the illness after eye-wateringly expensive overseas adventures, with one left-wing website last week announcing: “The rich and famous have spread coronavirus around Brazil.”

Another blog declared: “The rich have contaminated Brazil.”

But a guest at the royal family’s fateful lunch said it was wrong to scapegoat the wealthy for a sickness uninterested in social class. “Both poor and rich are dying all around the world,” they said. “People who travel more might have caught it first but the virus doesn’t choose its victims. It can attack anyone.”