Brazil, hit by the Covid-19 variant, overtakes the US in daily cases and deaths

The average number of daily deaths in Brazil over seven days has increased to 1,573, while the rate in the United States is plummeting – to 1,566 per day – amid fewer cases and more vaccination, according to Our World in Data at Oxford University. The US peaked at just over 3,400 daily deaths in January.

As many countries have left the worst of the pandemic behind, Brazil is facing one of its worst humanitarian crises with the rise in deaths and infections, registering almost 1,000 new cases every 20 minutes last week – more than 70,000 a day.

Public health experts attribute part of the blame to the rapid spread of the P.1 strain in the Amazonian city of Manaus, which studies have shown to be more contagious and more capable of reinfecting people than previous versions of the disease. Deaths have also increased as Brazil’s health system has struggled to cope, which means that patients who could have been saved have been left to die in chaotic hospital corridors or – in the worst case – suffocated to death. death from lack of oxygen.

Brazil now houses hundreds of new variants of Covid-19, the researchers said, warning that other, more dangerous versions may emerge the longer the disease is left to rot and mutate, threatening to undermine other countries’ progress against the pandemic.

“It looks like a nightmare,” said Mohamed Parrini, chief executive of Hospital Moinhos de Vento, in the southern part of the city of Porto Alegre, who rushed to convert other wards into makeshift ICUs. “The saddest thing is when you start to see the people around you being intubated – people’s husbands, spouses and uncles of employees.”

Like many doctors across the country, Parrini said he was seeing more younger patients – many in their 30s and 40s – than during the first wave of cases in Brazil in the middle of last year. Researchers are still trying to understand why.

Covid-19 has already killed more than 260,000 people in Brazil, including more than 10,000 last week. This puts the country behind only the USA, which has more than 525,000 deaths.

Public health experts also blamed President Jair Bolsonaro for not getting more vaccines and for minimizing the danger of the disease. The former army captain recently told Brazilians to go back to work and “stop whining.”

Brazil inoculated only about 4% of its population. This means that cases and deaths are expected to remain higher in Brazil in the coming months, say epidemiologists.

The USA, Brazil and India led the total number of daily deaths for each month of the pandemic, except for the first, when the virus started its deadly march from China to South Korea and Europe.

Public hospitals in the capital, Brasília and in more than 20 of the 26 Brazilian states have already reached full capacity or are close to running out of beds in their ICU wards. Hospitals in Brasilia, the Amazon and the south resorted to renting refrigerated containers to store the corpses after their local morgues filled up. Meanwhile, cemeteries in some cities, such as Campo Grande, in the midwest, dug their parking lots to make more space for graves.

As a proportion of its population of 213 million people, Brazil has suffered fewer deaths so far than the United States, as well as Mexico, Peru and several European countries. But the speed of the recent wave of fatalities in Brazil – and the fact that it is contrary to the global trend – has generated deep concern about the country’s destiny, as well as the potential of the P.1 strain to cause similar damage throughout the region.

A recent study showed that P.1 is 1.4 to 2.2 times more contagious than the versions of the virus previously found in Brazil and 25% to 61% more capable of reinfecting people.

Researchers believe that P.1 first appeared in Manaus in early November and, in January, the new strain was already responsible for 85% of new Covid-19 infections in the city.

Chaos soon followed. After many patients died of suffocation in Manaus in January, after a shortage of oxygen across the city, a convoy of trucks from Venezuela made the 26-hour journey south through the rainforest to deliver supplies. Prosecutors also investigated reports last month that intubated patients in the region were tied to their beds due to a lack of sedatives.

Although the rate of infection and the number of daily deaths have shown signs of declining in the state of Amazonas in recent weeks, other states further south are facing their darkest days as P.1 continues to spread. São Paulo, the largest and richest city in Brazil, called on volunteer doctors to help alleviate the burnout of the medical team, as ICU occupancy rates reach 80% for the first time.

Brazil started its vaccination campaign on January 17, but has moved slowly. There are mixed signals about how the main vaccine in Brazil, the Chinese vaccine CoronaVac and other Covid-19 vaccines will work against P.1. The Butantan Institute and Fiocruz, Brazilian research centers that are producing the CoronaVac vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine respectively, said the studies show that both are effective against P.1.

A lab study this week showed that Pfizer Inc.’s

the vaccine was able to neutralize P.1. However, another small study this month showed that plasma from people vaccinated five months ago with CoronaVac “failed to neutralize efficiently” the strain.

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