PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil – Brazil is battling Amazon’s new Covid-19 variant that threatens to send shockwaves around the world.
Brazil is home to less than 3% of the world’s population and is currently responsible for nearly a third of the daily global deaths from Covid-19 driven by the new variant. More than 300,000 have died, and the daily death toll now exceeds 3,000, a toll only taken by the much-populated US.
“We’re in the trenches here, waging a war,” said Andréia Cruz, a 42-year-old emergency room nurse in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the surrounding state of Rio Grande do Sul, nearly 5,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the past three weeks alone, more than in the last three months of last year.
The spread of the virus in Brazil threatens to make this country of 213 million inhabitants a worldwide threat to public health. The so-called P.1 strain, present in more than 20 countries and identified in New York last week, is according to a recent study.
The P.1 is now responsible for most of the new infections in Brazil, and many doctors here say they are seeing more young and otherwise healthy patients getting sick. According to official figures from The Wall Street Journal, about 30% of people who die of Covid-19 are under the age of 60, compared to an average of about 26% during Brazil’s previous peak between June and August.