Via The Globe and Mail: Experts sound the alarm ahead of Brazil’s third COVID-19 wave. Excerpt:
Weeks after Brazil experienced the COVID-19 pandemic’s deadliest month with 82,266 deaths recorded in April, medical experts in the country are already warning about a third wave.
Over the first few months of 2021, a punishing second wave – partly from the P.1 variant first identified in the city of Manaus – battered Brazil. Facing overwhelmed hospitals as well as oxygen and sedative shortages, the most populous country in Latin America saw April’s death toll surpass March’s record of 66,573 fatalities. But just as some states started to reduce public-health restrictions after daily infections and deaths declined since mid-April, COVID-19 cases are once again rising.
As of May 27, Brazil has confirmed more than 16.3 million cases and more than 456,000 deaths – the world’s second-highest death toll after the U.S. – since the beginning of the pandemic.
For Antonio Flores, an infectious disease specialist and medical co-ordinator for Médecins sans frontières (MSF) in Brazil, the upward trend signals the impending arrival of a third wave. He added that some municipalities are already seeing waitlists for intensive-care beds.
“There will be a third wave,” he said. “We just don’t know how hard and how fast it will hit, but we can say that it’s on the way because cases are going up again.”
There is already fear that this third wave would be devastating. On top of the fact that Brazil is entering its winter months, a big concern revolves around its sluggish vaccine rollout, which started on Jan. 18. In a country of around 214 million people, the campaign has given out 65.27 million doses – with 20.6 per cent of the population receiving at least one dose and 10.1 per cent being fully vaccinated – as of May 27. The daily vaccination rate for most of May was also lower than the peak in mid-April, only surpassing it on May 24.
This slow pace frustrates Dr. Flores. He said Brazil has the expertise and infrastructure through its national immunization program to do better. In fact, during the swine flu pandemic, it administered more than 89 million vaccine doses in less than four months in 2010.
He attributed the problem instead to the federal government’s lack of co-ordination.
