The consternation dominates in Brazil in front of the number of victims announced each evening in the media: 1,726 dead Tuesday, March 2, 1,910 dead the next day and the country passed the 261,000 dead mark on Thursday, with 1,781 new deaths. “We are witnessing a general deterioration of indicators”, alerted, in a statement, the public medical research center Fiocruz, noting “An increase in contaminations and deaths and an intensive care occupation of more than 80% in nineteen of the twenty-seven states of the country”.
As in the first wave in March 2020, it is the governors and mayors who put in place restrictions and curfews this week, in disagreement with the federal power. President Jair Bolsonaro once again criticized local authorities on Thursday March 4, begging them “To stop whining”. The restrictions are however timid, while only 7.4 million people have been vaccinated, less than 4% of the population.
In Manaus, specialists are hardly surprised by the deterioration of epidemic indicators. “Like last year, the same film is repeated. The situation in Manaus gets out of hand and, a month later, the rest of the country suffers the same fate ”, says Felipe Naveca, virologist at the Fiocruz center in Manaus.
The capital of the state of Amazonas (2.2 million inhabitants), which experienced an explosion of cases in December and January and the appearance of a local variant called P.1, is just beginning to breathe. Manaus has become a research ground for scientists who seek to understand what awaits the rest of the country, and in particular to better understand the behavior of the variant. In recent weeks, three studies have shed some light on this subject. They are still only available in prepublication (that is, they have not passed the peer review filter), but their results are highly debated in the scientific community.
“A few isolated cases of reinfection”
In the first study, presented on February 26 on the Research Square website, researchers analyzed 250 samples of genetic material from patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the state of Amazonas. They concluded that there was a marked increase in the viral load with the P.1 variant – up to ten times greater – in adults between 18 and 59 years old and in elderly women. “For older men, we didn’t find a difference. Our hypothesis is that they are vulnerable to all strains with an already very high viral load ”, explains virologist Felipe Naveca. The researchers also showed the predominance of cases of the P.1 variant during this second wave in Manaus. A phenomenon that risks repeating itself throughout Brazil, where its presence has already been detected in seventeen states.
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