PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil – Brazil is fighting a new version of Amazon’s Covid-19 that threatens to send shockwaves around the globe.
At home, with less than 3% of the world’s population, Brazil currently accounts for almost a third of the global daily deaths caused by Covid-19, caused by the new variant. More than 300,000 people have died, and daily deaths are now more than 3,000, a much larger population in the United States alone.
“We are here in the trenches, fighting for a war,” said Andréia Cruz, a 42-year-old emergency nurse in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the last three weeks alone, the state of Rio Grande do Sul has seen nearly 5,000 people die from Covid-19, more than in the past three months.
The spread of the virus in Brazil threatens to turn this country of 213 million into a global danger to public health. The so-called P.1 strain, present in more than 20 countries and identified in New York last week, is up to 2.2 times more contagious and up to 61% more capable of re-infecting people than previous versions of the coronavirus, according to a recent study.
P.1 is now responsible for most new infections in Brazil, with many doctors saying more young and otherwise healthy people are getting sick. About 30 percent of people who die from Covid-19 are now under 60, compared to an average of about 26 percent during Brazil’s previous peak between June and August, according to official figures analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.