The Brazilian variant of the coronavirus, called P1, is little known, but it is raising alarm in the world because it is more contagious, which has led several countries to suspend flights from the South American giant, the epicenter of the pandemic.
“The fear is justified, P1 is a more contagious variant and spread very quickly in Brazil, which is a huge country and where the pandemic is spiraling out of control,” said microbiologist Natalia Pasternak, director of the Questao Institute of Science.
The P1 surfaced last December in the city of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, but was only identified in Japan as a new variant in January among some travelers returning from that region of northern Brazil.
The variant has also been found in several South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela. It also reached the United States, Canada, Germany and France, which announced the suspension of flights from Brazil and other countries on Monday.
– Why is it more contagious?
Like the South African variant, P1 has the E484K mutation, which, according to some studies, could cause more infections than the other strains because it requires more antibodies to resist the virus.
It also has numerous variations in the Spike protein, which cause the virus to enter cells to infect them.
“It’s like he has a master key that allows him to open multiple doors at once,” said Jesem Orellana, an Amazon researcher at the Fiocruz Institute.
“And from an epidemiological point of view, the variant can destabilize regions where there is little control over the circulation of the virus and with little infrastructure, causing hospitals to collapse,” as happened in Manaus, where dozens of patients died from lack of oxygen.
“If the Brazilian authorities had been responsible, they would have isolated Manaus, as China did with Wuhan. But instead they sent patients to other regions of the country, along with companions, some of whom were infected with P1,” Orellana complains.
In fact, the Brazilian government should have “closed the borders to prevent this variant from reaching other countries, some poorer, such as Peru,” he added.
– Is it more deadly?
So far, no study has concluded that P1 is more deadly.
In preliminary research, Orellana found that P1 did not increase the mortality rate in Manaus hospitals, compared to the first wave of the pandemic, in April 2020.
That analysis coincides with two studies published Tuesday that the British variant does not lead to more serious cases of Covid-19.
The escalation of deaths from Covid-19 in Brazil in recent weeks is due to the collapse of hospitals “because this variant is more contagious, but also due to the general relaxation” of the population in the face of preventive measures, “tired of the measures quarantine, ”adds Orellana.
Preliminary studies showed that the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine, the most widely used vaccine in Brazil, is effective against P1, as well as that of Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
– How much is it distributed in Brazil?
The P1 variant spread over almost the entire Brazilian territory, although there is a lack of data to measure the percentage responsible for infections in each region.
“Genomic surveillance in Brazil is one of the worst in the world,” in terms of sequencing the new species, “it is not for nothing that we discovered P1 almost 60 days later, in Japan,” said Orellana.
The uncontrolled circulation of the virus has led to new mutations, with variants of the same strain, such as P2, circulating in Rio de Janeiro, or P4, recently discovered in Belo Horizonte, in the neighboring state of Minas Gerais.
“Brazil became an open-air variant laboratory,” said Orellana.
To avoid the circulation of these variants, “the ideal would be to have enough doses for mass vaccination and lockdown at the same time, as England or Israel did,” adds Pasternak microbiologist.
“But in Brazil we have neither one nor the other: incarceration, mainly due to a lack of political will,” adding that “we do not have enough doses for vaccination,” explains the specialist, citing the “lack. to national coordination “of the fight against the pandemic by the government of Jair Bolsonaro.