From the Wall St Journal:
But from the Brazilian jungle and northeastern coastal cities to the southern farming belt, doctors and hospital directors said in interviews with the Journal that the dangers from P.1 are overwhelming and obvious.
“We’re seeing patients who aren’t obese, who have no comorbidities, who are not old but, even so, the virus just overwhelms them,” said Diego Montarroyos Simões, an intensive-care doctor in the northeast city of Recife."
The people dying are no longer old people.
“The virus is claiming parents and their children,” said Eduardo Lopes, 47, an assistant nurse at one of the main hospitals treating Covid-19 patients in Belo Horizonte.
In Porto Alegre, where at least 60% of new Covid-19 infections are caused by P.1, the number of patients between 40 and 69 years old dying in the city has risen 125.5% since December, while total fatalities rose only 102.7%, according to official data analyzed by Álvaro Krüger Ramos, a mathematician at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
There's even a throwback to the miserable days of Donald Trump -- he was just like Bolsonaro:
Brazil also owes its current catastrophe to a fatal combination of what public health experts say was mismanagement of the crisis by the government.
President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has played down the dangers of the disease, disparaging face masks and recently telling Brazilians to get back to work and “stop whining.”
His health ministry has spent tens of millions of dollars on unproven cures for the disease while dragging its feet on vaccine supply deals.
Brazil doesn't have enough vaccines available for its population:
With 10 mutations on the spike protein that helps the virus attach to human cells, P.1 has been found to be more contagious than previous versions. But P.1 also appears to cause more serious illness, said José Eduardo Levi, a virologist at the lab and hospital group DASA.
With vaccines slow to arrive, some cities have taken drastic measures. Araraquara, home to 240,000 people and one of the first cities to be devastated by P.1, shut down supermarkets for six days and public transport for 10 days last month.
At least one mayor gets what's happening:
He said the president’s argument that Brazil must remain open to save its economy made no sense. “No one is going to invest in the middle of a pandemic—either you deal with the pandemic or the economy doesn’t recover,” Mr. Silva said.
In Araraquara, 19 people under the age of 40 have died from Covid-19 this year, or 8.75% of all fatalities from the disease, compared with only one person in 2020, representing 1.1%. One of them was Jorge Carbone, a 35-year-old store manager with no previous health problems. Less than two weeks after complaining of a sore throat, he was dead.
I believe those who think we are out of danger are sadly misinformed, and the rest of us will bear the brunt of their decisions to travel, party, drop their masks and abandon social distancing.
Shorter version: COVID is not over yet, it's not even close.
This is an open thread, all topics welcome.
