‘This is no joke’
MMA fighter from Danbury tests positive for COVID, warns city
DANBURY — As the city led Connecticut in new coronavirus cases for a fifth straight week, a top-ranked MMA fighter who tested positive for COVID-19 took off the gloves in a Facebook Live message to his fans and fellow Danburians.
“Don’t play around with this,” said Glover Teixeira, the UFC’s No. 4 ranked light heavyweight, during a Thursday night Facebook Live broadcast with Mayor Mark Boughton. “This thing is no joke.”
Teixeira’s message, which was partly in Portuguese, came at the same time that city officials confirmed 39 school cafeteria workers were being quarantined as a precaution after one employee of the vendor Sodexo tested positive for COVID-19.
That employee, who did not have a fever or respiratory symptoms, was at a training meeting with 38 other Sodexho
All eyes in Connecticut have been on Danbury since Gov. Ned Lamont declared a COVID-19 alert on Aug. 21 after a “serious outbreak” of 178 new cases in two weeks that called for “extreme precaution.”
employees a week before school began, schools Superintendent Sal Pascarella told parents in an email Thursday night.
“[I]n an overabundance of caution, because these are employees involved in food preparation and distribution, we made the decision to quarantine a large number of employees who had been in training with this employee,” Pascarella said in the letter.
The quarantined group has tested negative for the virus, Boughton said.
All eyes in Connecticut have been on Danbury since Gov. Ned Lamont declared a COVID-19 alert on Aug. 21 after a “serious outbreak” of 178 new cases in two weeks that called for “extreme precaution.”
Boughton responded by canceling youth sports, cracking down on group gatherings and urging the school district to start the new year with distance learning for all 12,000 students.
While Boughton said he wanted to be careful about scaring people in Danbury into a panic, he was determined to take the recommendations of his health and medical advisers seriously.
“I wish I could always give people great news, but my job is to make the best decision I can based on the data I have,” Boughton said on Friday. “I took an oath to protect the health, safety and well-being of my residents.”
The state reinforced Boughton’s message by encouraging Danburians to wear masks, practice social distancing, stay at home as much as possible, and get free testing often.
On Friday, the city’s per capita COVID-19 numbers continued to lead the state, although City Hall believes the rise in new cases has plateaued. Over the last three weeks, Danbury’s 7-day total of new cases has dropped from 145 to 92 to 77, for example.
“The numbers continue to drop but not as much as we want to see them drop,” Boughton said. “In our target population we are still seeing a (positivity) rate) of 5 or 6, and we need to get that down to 1 or lower in order to free up the schools and our businesses.”
Boughton said the outbreak of new cases was concentrated in an area from the Danbury Mall to Main Street to Federal Road. The positivity rate is the percentage of all coronavirus tests that are positive.
Danbury’s COVID numbers mean it will be several more weeks before the city can think about convening a meeting to decide when kids might be cleared for sports, and when schools might return to a hybrid model of limited class time.
The difficulty, city health officials say, is that people in Danbury have the highly contagious virus without knowing it.
“We have seen that happen frequently lately with our uptick in cases,” said Fernanda Carvalho, an epidemiologist and Danbury’s acting associate director of community health. “Most of our cases do not have any symptoms – and that’s why we encourage everyone to get tested, regardless of whether they have symptoms or not, because you never know.”
That was the case for local hero Teixeira, a 205pound mixed martial arts fighter with 31 wins, who was scheduled to fight top-ranked fellow Brazilian Thiago Santos on Sept. 19.
A routine test required by the UFC changed that.
“It was a big surprise because I wasn’t sick at all,” Teixeira said on Facebook Live Thursday. “A couple days later (after testing positive) I had a little bit of a runny nose and a cough but that lasted a day or two days and now I am back to normal.”
Normal for Teixeira means training for his fight with Santos, which has been rescheduled for Oct. 3.
Teixeira, who shut down his Bethel gym as a precaution when he tested positive, urged Danburians to learn from his cautionary tale.
“You guys need to go get tested – it’s free and it doesn’t take too long,” Teixeira said. “It’s worth it because you could give it to your parents or somebody else, and it’s going to be bad.”
Boughton agreed, saying the last thing he wanted to do as the city’s top elected official, is downplay the coronavirus.
“You can’t just downplay it,” Boughton said. “Because then people aren’t going to wear masks.”