Covid-19: Brazil on the Brink
With more than 294,000 lives lost, #Brazil has the second-highest #Covid-19 death toll in the world and Biden’s border crisis is bringing those variants into America.
For more than 20 days in a row, the country has recorded more than 2,000 daily deaths from the disease. Healthcare workers around the country have been pleading for more support as they battle surging rates of infection. Yet President Jair Bolsonaro continues to downplay the gravity of the situation. Our team on the ground reports from Sao Paulo, one of the regions most affected in recent weeks, as well as Rio de Janeiro, where beaches have just been closed.
Inside Brazil’s Fight Against P.1, a Fast-Spreading Covid-19 Variant
An aggressive Covid-19 variant called P.1 has spread from the Amazon to other parts of Brazil and has now been identified in U.S. cases. WSJ’s Paulo Trevisani reports from Porto Alegre’s overwhelmed hospitals, where doctors say young people are getting ill
In-Depth: What we know about the Brazil variant
SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Now that two cases of the Brazil variant have been detected in San Diego County, a lot of people have questions.
Is the variant more contagious? Is it more deadly? How effective are the vaccines against it?
Much of our current understanding of the Brazil variant comes from a city in the center of the Amazon Rainforest: Manaus.
Early in the pandemic, the original version of the virus swept through the city of roughly 2.2 million. After a peak in April, cases declined and stayed low for months. By October, one study estimated 76 percent of the city’s population had antibodies, what they thought was enough for herd immunity.
But in December, scientists detected a variant in the city called P.1 that had several mutations in its spike protein. Hospitalizations surged.
“They actually had more hospitalizations and more cases than even the first wave,” said Dr. Christian Ramers of Family Health Centers of San Diego. “So it’s a real cautionary tale, suggesting that people that had gotten COVID before were now able to be reinfected by this new strain.”
