Saturated hospitals filled with dying people and corpses. Helpless nurses and tearful families. Bodies piled up in small refrigerated trucks, buried hastily in mass graves dug with a backhoe loader. At the height of the epidemic, Manaus, Brazil, the martyr city of the Covid-19, offered the world a certain vision of the apocalypse.
Eight months later, would the largest city in the Amazon already be out of the woods? A study, published Tuesday, December 8 in the scientific journal Science, might suggest. Conducted, between March and October, by some thirty Brazilian and international researchers, from institutions as prestigious as the universities of Harvard, Sao Paulo (USP) and Oxford, this leads to a stunning conclusion: more three quarters of the inhabitants of Manaus (76%) now have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. A sufficiently high level allowing the city to theoretically be able to benefit from collective immunity and thus stop the uncontrolled spread of the disease.
The study confirms preliminary data disclosed by the research group, in September, on the MedRxiv site, and which at the time had calculated the antibody positivity rate of the inhabitants of Manaus at 66%. In total, the capital of the state of Amazonas deplored more than 3,100 deaths as of December 8 due to Covid-19, a mortality rate of 144 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest in Brazil, nearly twice the national average.
But, after a very difficult period between May and June, the epidemic figures began for several months to decline significantly. The number of cases detected per week in Manaus was thus divided by three between May and September, from 4,500 to only 1,380. The number of weekly deaths was divided by eight: 292 at the peak of the epidemic. in May against 33 at the beginning of September. All these data suggest that group immunity would indeed have been reached in Manaus.
Disturbing rebound
The sprawling Amazonian metropolis, as large as the Ile-de-France and populated by 2.2 million souls, has it really become Covid safe ? When asked about the question, most researchers are skeptical. “This study was carried out by competent scientists and provides very interesting information”, reacts Guilherme Werneck, renowned Brazilian epidemiologist, before pointing out the shortcomings of this document.
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