Covid-19 Variant Rages in Brazil, which presents a global risk

“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.

Public health researchers warn that this is not just Brazil’s crisis, stressing what they say is widespread satisfaction in the United States and elsewhere about the risks posed by Latin America and other unvaccinated areas around the world. Brazil has completely vaccinated only 1.8% of its population.

“He is quick to say that this pandemic is over, and not over,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University. “I’m afraid to think about what will happen when P.1 manages to reach [places] which is unlikely to be vaccinated for some time. ”

Brazil has become a global pariah, as dozens of nations impose restrictions on travelers from the country, including neighboring Colombia, as well as others such as the British government Peru, with 40% of infections in its heavily affected capital coming from P.1, while Tiny Uruguay, which borders Rio Grande do Sul, has seen infections rise to a historic level.

The researchers said that preliminary studies suggest that existing vaccines that are being released worldwide are effective in P.1, but further studies are needed to see if their effectiveness is reduced with the new variant. The more the virus is left to unleash and move here, the more likely the strains to appear and the more aggressive they are, threatening the progress of vaccination made by the US and elsewhere.

Researchers are still alarmed that the P.1 variant itself has already begun to move, showing changes that could make it even more infectious, said Felipe Naveca, who led some of the first research in P.1 and works at the Oswaldo Foundation. Cruz, a public health institution.

“If we do not stop the circulation of the virus, it will not stop evolving,” he said.

Insufficient approach to masking and social distancing and a slow launch of the vaccine have helped turn Brazil into the perfect breeding ground for variants, the researchers said. P.1 emerged in Manaus, an important industrial hub from where truckers probably contributed to its rapid spread across the country.

A later arrival than strain B.1.1.7 in the United Kingdom, P.1. it remains somewhat of a mystery – in part because Brazil also tests less than the UK, which means data are rarer. While researchers know that P.1 is more contagious and more capable of reinfection, there is still no definitive answer as to whether it is also more lethal.

But from the Brazilian jungle and northeastern coastal cities to the southern agricultural belt, doctors and hospital directors said in interviews with the Journal that the dangers in P.1 are overwhelming and obvious.

“We see patients who are not obese, who do not have comorbidities, who are not old, but even so, the virus overwhelms them,” said Diego Montarroyos Simões, an intensive care physician in the northeast of Recife.

A thousand miles to the southwest, in the mining state of Minas Gerais, many doctors are seeing an increase in younger and sicker patients compared to an increase in the number of cases in the country in the middle of last year.

“The virus is claiming parents and their children,” said Eduardo Lopes, 47, a nurse at one of the main hospitals treating Covid-19 patients in Belo Horizonte.

In Porto Alegre, where at least 60% of new Covid-19 infections are caused by P.1, the number of patients between the ages of 40 and 69 who died in the city has risen by 125.5% since December. Total deaths rose by only 102.7%, according to official data analyzed by Álvaro Krüger Ramos, a mathematician at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Researchers say it could be a reflection that young people take more risks as they get tired of social distancing rules or because many of Brazil’s oldest and most vulnerable have died or been vaccinated. Or it could be more lethal, although I say more studies are needed.

The scale of the human tragedy here has been amplified by the breakdown of the Brazilian health care system, which is so overtaxed that patients hospitalized for anything from injuries from car accidents to heart attacks are also more likely to die.

ICU sections in all but two states are now full or struggling to cope with more than 80 percent capacity, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation said. The country’s funeral association is asking funeral homes to stock up on urns.

After the lack of oxygen caused the death of patients suffocating earlier this year in the Amazonian city of Manaus, hundreds of cities across the country have prepared for a similar fate. Even the most important private hospitals in São Paulo, which treat billionaires and presidents across Latin America, have been left without ICU beds in recent weeks.

Brazil also owes the current catastrophe to a fatal combination of what public health experts say has been mismanagement of the crisis by the government.

President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, reduced the dangers of the disease, despising the face masks and recently told Brazilians to return to work and “stop complaining.”

His health ministry has spent tens of millions of dollars on unproven remedies for the disease, while setting foot on vaccine supply offers.

“Why hurry to get vaccinated,” Bolsonaro told supporters in December, saying the pandemic was “almost over.”

Many Brazilians have adopted the same attitude and refused to bow to a patchwork of extinguishments and restrictions imposed by cities across the country.

State governments sought vaccines without federal aid. São Paulo, Brazil’s richest state, has reached an agreement with the Chinese to test and produce the Sinovac Covid-19, CoronaVac, at the Butantan Institute, its biomedical research center, and several northern states have turned to Russia. , signing acquisitions for Sputnik V shot.

The Brazilian Ministry of Health said it was doing everything possible to speed up vaccinations and provided 562 million doses to be administered this year.

But more than two months after it began, Brazil’s vaccination campaign was not enough, public health experts said.

With 10 mutations in the protein that help the virus attach to human cells, P.1 has been found to be more contagious than previous versions. But P.1 also appears to cause more serious illness, said José Eduardo Levi, a virologist at the DASA laboratory and hospital group.

With vaccines arriving slowly, some cities have taken drastic measures. Araraquara, home to 240,000 people and one of the first cities devastated by P.1, closed supermarkets for six days and public transport for 10 days last month.

“The biggest humanitarian tragedy in Brazil’s history will be the coronavirus,” said Edinho Silva, Araraquara’s mayor.

He said the president’s argument that Brazil must remain open to save its economy makes no sense. “No one will invest in the middle of a pandemic – whether you are dealing with the pandemic or the economy is not recovering,” Mr Silva said.

In Araraquara, 19 people under the age of 40 died from Covid-19 this year, or 8.75% of all deaths from the disease, compared to one person in 2020, or 1.1%.

One of them was Jorge Carbone, a 35-year-old store manager with no previous health problems. Less than two weeks after complaining of a sore throat, he was dead.

“The pain of losing him is unbearable,” said Luzia Abud, his 50-year-old aunt. “People just disappear,”

Marcos Oling, 47, an Uber driver from Porto Alegre, became infected and has been in oxygen for more than a week, most of which he spent in a wheelchair due to a lack of spare beds. He said he was frustrated by those who did not take the virus seriously.

“People don’t think anything will happen to them,” he said.

Write to Paulo Trevisani at [email protected], Samantha Pearson at [email protected] and Luciana Magalhaes at [email protected]