I promptly recalled all the public awareness ads on TV and in magazines urging people to seek immediate medical attention if they suspect they have dengue, and I felt almost a civic duty to report to a hospital. There is no cure for dengue, but timely treatment lowers the death rate below 1 percent. Also, I was taking a prescription anti-inflammatory drug called meloxicam to relieve neck pain and I needed to know, for sure, if I should keep taking it. (Every Brazilian knows that dengue patients shouldn’t take aspirin because it can aggravate bleeding.)

I spent more than three hours in the waiting room of a private hospital covered by my health insurance before the doctor could take a look at my blood count. He then said it was fine. He proceeded to tell me that specific tests for dengue fever could be performed only six days after the first symptoms. “Yes, it could be dengue,” he told me. “But honestly it could be anything.” He said it was fine to keep taking the meloxicam, and sent me home with a prescription to reduce my fever.

I was relieved, until I resorted again to Dr. Google. Apparently it is possible to test for dengue after the first day of fever, before antibodies appear. The NS1 antigen test is cheap and reliable. I also learned that it was definitely not advisable to continue to take meloxicam because, like aspirin, it could also raise the risk of bleeding; my orthopedist called the next day to forbid me from doing it.

I assume the doctor I saw at the hospital didn’t report me as having dengue, so I guess I’m not included in the Ministry of Health statistics. It took three weeks for me to find out for sure it was dengue, after a test at a private laboratory showed that my blood serum contained antibodies to the disease.

The situation is even worse within the public health system. Recently, a friend with symptoms of dengue fever waited more than four hours to be seen by a doctor in a community health care center. Because of the excess of patients, he was told he couldn’t get a blood count test for another day or two, and the results would take several more days to be processed. Blood serum tests were out of the question. “Patients who arrive after 4 p.m. are told to return the next day,” he told me. “My doctor advised me to return ‘if the dengue was hemorrhagic.’ ”