A protester places a rose on a blanket during a protest against the government’s pandemic response outside Raul Gazzola Hospital in Rio de Janeiro on March 24.
Photographer: Dado Galdieri / Bloomberg
Photographer: Dado Galdieri / Bloomberg
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Stepping under her The worst period of the pandemic, with daily records of cases and deaths, Brazil is facing a daunting development: an increasing number of deaths among young people.
Until this month, according to the government data, about 2,030 Brazilians decrepit 30-39 died because of Covid, more than double the number recorded in January. Of those aged 40, there were 4,150 deaths in March, up from 1,823 in January, and for those aged 20-29, deaths rose to 505 from 242.
“Before, the risk factor for death from Covid-19 was to be older, with a certain comorbidity,” said Domingos Alves, a medical professor who is part of the national monitoring group. “Now the risk is Brazilian.”
Fiocruz, a nonprofit health organization, issued a Friday report showing the same trend with slightly different figures.
He wrote cases among them decrepit 30-59 increased from the beginning of the year to mid-March, at a rate almost double the national average of 316%. In these age groups, deaths increased by at least 317%, compared to 223% for Brazil as a whole.
In Sao Paulo, the country’s richest and most populous state, growth is particularly important in private hospitals, Secretary of State Jean Gorinchteyn said in an interview. Those over 60 continue to dominate hospitalizations, but the share of those under 50 has risen to 15% from 10% last year.
In the state capital, more and more people between the ages of 20 and 54 are becoming infected, the city’s health secretary, Edson Aparecido, GloboNews TV reported on Friday. Younger patients wait longer to seek medical attention and are sicker on arrival.
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The explanation for the rising rate of infection among young people – in a country that is largely young – remains unclear, although medical officials and experts suggest more possibilities. First, throughout 2020, local and regional restrictions have hampered socialization. That changed with the holidays, the New Year, and weight loss blockages.
Second, a variant first observed in the Amazon city Manaus is probably partly to blame, according to Jaques Sztajnbok, who is helping lead the ICU at Emílio Ribas Hospital, one of Brazil’s main infectious disease facilities. Patients become very ill with this or the British version, which is even more contagious. A study conducted in Sao Paulo found one of the two variants in 71% of cases.
Health workers are holding a meeting while treating patients inside a Covid-19 intensive care unit at a field hospital in the Heliopolis favela in Sao Paulo on March 19.
Photographer: Jonne Roriz / Bloomberg
Third, vaccines are limited in Brazil and there is no timeline for inoculating young people.
Fernando Brum, director of Santa Casa Hospital in Sorocaba, said that the mutation of the virus into a much more contagious version, with a viral load that makes people sick in a faster and more aggressive way, meant that young people went through in mostly asymptomatic cases to be severely affected.
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Brum, whose hospital is a two-hour drive from Sao Paulo, says ICUs are also full of 30-year-olds. He estimates that the age of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has decreased by 50% compared to 2020.
“The intensive care unit is busy and uninterrupted,” he said. Patients aged 30 years represent at least half of these beds, and the average time spent in hospital has tripled compared to last year. He recently went down for a gloomy reason – patients die faster.
Sztajnbok said it is not uncommon to see people under the age of 40 or even 20 without the risk factors needing intubation and life support. Before, he said, patients were over 65 years old. “The first time this happened, we were shocked,” he said. “We were shocked a second time. We are gone now. ”
The longest hospital stays are putting pressure on Brazil’s health care system, struggling after decades of underinvestment. ICU capacity rates were at or above 80% in 25 states, according to the new Fiocruz report, while 17 states had levels above 90%.
A worker wearing protective equipment digs a grave at Vila Formosa Cemetery in Sao Paulo on March 24.
Photographer: Victor Moriyama / Bloomberg
In a March 23 report, Fiocruz also pointed to a “disproportionate increase in mortality in the country”, which reached 3.1% from 2% at the end of last year. The jump signals that patients could die from lack of care or health care failures, he said.
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Brazil has become the epicenter of the pandemic, it recently reported records of over 100,000 cases and 3,650 deaths per day. At home, with 212 million people, the country only follows the US in the virus tax. While vaccinations have increased in the last week, the 19 million photos taken so far have covered only 7% of the population with a single dose and have completely vaccinated about 2%.
Switching to younger victims means that pregnant women become infected, said Fatima Marinho, epidemiologist and senior advisor at Vital Strategies. The virus has also killed several children under the age of 10. They tend to have different symptoms, leading to a misdiagnosis, she added.
Marinho estimates a national death toll of 500,000 by June. He passed 300,000 this week, two and a half months after hitting 200,000, half the time it took to go from 100,000 to 200,000.
Although vaccination rates are accelerating, she has another fear: “Such an intense circulation of the virus means that Brazil may soon have other strains of the virus that become resistant to vaccines.”
– With the assistance of Isadora Sanches and Rafael Mendes