Simone Guimarães, a retired 52-year-old teacher in Rio de Janeiro, lost at least five relatives to COVID-19: her husband, sister, two brothers-in-law and the godfather of her grandchild.

She also lost friends and neighbors.

She woke to the news on Saturday that Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the preemptive arrest of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom she blames for her losses.

A judge claimed Bolsonaro was intent on escaping days before he was set to begin a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Social media filled with posts Saturday remembering people lost to COVID-19, which also happened in September when the Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro, even though the legal case had nothing to do with the former president's pandemic response.

Guimarães followed every vote in Bolsonaro’s trial. She was at a hospital with her sister in 2021 when Bolsonaro, who was president at the time, mimicked patients gasping for air.

"I had my forehead against my sister’s and I told her ‘you'll be alright’ and she looked at me and said ‘I can’t breathe anymore’,” Guimarães recalled.

Her sister later died.

She now feels indirectly vindicated, like many other Brazilians who lost relatives to the disease.

They say Bolsonaro’s conviction and imprisonment cleansed their souls without delivering justice for their grief.

Bolsonaro denied wrongdoing during his trial.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected an appeal from his legal team, though another may come this week.

Before his arrest Saturday, he had been under house arrest since August.

There have been more than 700,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Brazil since 2020, the world’s second-highest toll after the United States.

In 2021, epidemiologists at the Federal University of Pelotas estimated 4 in 5 of those deaths could have been avoided if the Bolsonaro administration had supported containment measures and accelerated vaccine purchases.

Bolsonaro’s government ignored repeated pleas to sign additional vaccine contracts.

He publicly questioned the reliability of shots and mocked contract terms, once suggesting Pfizer recipients would have no legal recourse if they “turned into alligators.”

Brazil faced vaccine shortages and doses were released in phases by age and health risk.

The pandemic marked a change in course for Bolsonaro’s popularity.

During the 2022 campaign, which he lost to Lula, television ads replayed footage of Bolsonaro mocking patients struggling to breathe, which is a common COVID-19 symptom, and highlighted comments widely seen as dismissive of victims and their families.

“Specialists say and all elements point to the fact that Bolsonaro lost his reelection because of his denial attitude during the pandemic," said Eduardo Scolese, politics editor at the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper during Bolsonaro’s term and author of “1461 Dias na Trincheira” (”1461 Days in the Trenches").

As the Brazilian leader resisted public health measures, state and local governments imposed their own.

The dispute reached the Supreme Court, which ruled states and municipalities could enact distancing, quarantines and other sanitary rules.

In October 2021, a Senate committee recommended charging Bolsonaro for actions and omissions during the pandemic, including charlatanism, inciting crime, misuse of public funds and crimes against humanity.

The case sat dormant until September, when Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered police to expand the investigation.

The case remains underway and sealed.

AP video shot by: Lucas Dumphreys and Maycron Abade