“Brazil is a threat to humanity”

Daily check-in dead. A new strain of the super contagious coronavirus out of control. Hospitals on the brink of collapse. And a president who refuses to take the bull by the woods. “Brazil is a threat to humanity”, concludes Jesem Orellana, epidemiologist at the Fiocruz / Amazonia Foundation. And he continues: “The fight against covid-19 was lost in 2020 and there is not the slightest chance of reversing this tragic scenario in the first half of 2021”.

“All we can do is wait the miracle of vaccination mass change or a radical change in the management of the pandemic. Today Brazil is a threat to humanity and an open-air laboratory, where impunity in management seems to be the rule, ”he condemned.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week urged the country to take “aggressive” measures against the pandemic.

“If Brazil doesn’t take it seriously, it will affect all neighbors and beyond, so it’s not just Brazil, I think it affects all of Latin America.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Director General of the World Health Organization

“If Brazil doesn’t take it seriously, it will affect all the neighbors and beyond, so it’s not just about Brazil, I think it concerns all of Latin America.”

Vaccination go slowly: Brazil applied the first dose to 8.6 million people (4.1% of the population), while 2.9 million received the second.

The vaccines used are CoronaVac, from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, and the Swedish-British vaccine from Astrazeneca / Oxford.

The Ministry of Health claims to be in negotiations with other laboratories and would have recognized that “the national vaccination campaign may be interrupted for lack of doses”, according to a letter to the Chinese ambassador published Tuesday by the portal of information G1. .

In the letter, the ministry asks the Chinese mission to help it negotiate with the Sinopharm laboratory the purchase of 30 million doses of its immunizer.

Nearly 2,000 deaths per day

The country has recorded more than 266,000 deaths and 11 million cases since the start of the pandemic.

It has the second highest number of deaths in the world after the United States and the third highest number of confirmed cases.

Despite this, President Jair Bolsonaro constantly opposed quarantine measures and expert advice on the fight against the coronavirus.

Tuesday, the country registered 1972 deaths by Covid, a new daily record.

According to Fiocruz, 15 state capitals have intensive care units (ICUs) that are more than 90% of its capacity, including Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and São Paulo.

Two cities, Porto Alegre and Campo Grande, have exceeded the UCI’s reception capacity.

In its report, the institute warned that the figures indicate “an overload and even the collapse of health systems“.

What do we know about the new variant

Preliminary data from the University of São Paulo, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford suggests that variant P.1 it could be twice as transmissible than the original version of the virus.

It also suggests that the new variant could escape immunity accumulated by having the original version of Covid. The probability of reinfection is between 25% and 60%.

Last week, the Fiocruz Institute said that P.1 was only one among several “variants worrying “which have become dominant in six of the eight states studied by the Rio de Janeiro-based organization.

“This information is an atomic bomb,” Roberto Kraenkel, of the Brazil Covid-19 Observatory, told the Washington Post.

With news from agencies and BBC News

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