Surging in remote and poor areas, Brazil's COVID-19 death toll is 2nd-highest in the world

[Okieman]

ICUs are full, oxygen is running low, and a newly contagious variant is spreading in the most vulnerable areas

Saša Petricic ? CBC News ? Posted: Jan 29, 2021 4:00 AM ET

It was late at night and a chaotic crowd had gathered in front of a hospital in Manaus, the biggest city in Brazil's vast Amazon and the last hope for medical care for tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients in the region.

<snip>

Indeed, the death rate in that part of Brazil is more than 170 per 100,000 residents, three and a half times Canada's. Nationally, deaths have topped 215,000, putting Brazil's toll second only to the United States. It has the third-highest number of coronavirus cases after the U.S. and India, at more than nine million.

<snip>

"Over the past two weeks, we've seen a sharp increase," said Pierre Van Heddegem, the head of a mission run by Doctors Without Borders in the region, in a Skype interview with CBC News.

"Fifty to 60 per cent of the people we test, test positive. That's a huge amount."

<snip>

Oxygen supplies for the sick have all but run out as scenes of desperation spread online: five patients sharing a single tank in a hospital room, the infected suffocating to death and distraught nurses crying after losing patients. Long lines have been forming in Manaus and other centres, with families desperate to fill empty oxygen tanks for sick relatives at home.

Meanwhile, teams of mortuary workers in hazmat suits have been patrolling the city to pick up bodies of those who die in their own beds, after being turned away from hospitals.

<snip>

In the favelas of Rio, the densely packed slums on the outskirts of Brazil's second-largest city, the crisis grows.

"It's getting very much worse every day," Dr. Gustavo Treistman told CBC News over Skype from Rio.

He works in the Souza Marques Family Clinic in Madureira, a poor neighbourhood where some 200 people die daily.

Treistman says he sees 30 to 40 patients who have COVID-19 during every six-hour shift, sending the serious ones to hospital by ambulance when he can and seeing some die when he can't. Most are sent home.

<snip>

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/petricic-brazil-covid-manaus-1.5891108

 

[Okieman]

Fast-Spreading Covid-19 Variant Surges in Brazil, Worrying Scientists

Country could become new breeding ground for mutations, researchers say, at the same time it faces a dire vaccine shortage

<snip>

While researchers are still in the early stages of investigating the Amazonian variant, epidemiologists say it is at least partly responsible for a more than fourfold rise in cases in the past month in Manaus, the city of two million in the heart of the rainforest.

They also say it may explain a puzzling rise in serious cases of the disease among younger patients, echoing early findings on the U.K. variant. A U.K. government health-advisory panel said recently that studies point to a roughly 30% higher mortality rate among patients infected with the B.1.1.7 variant first identified there late last year.

<snip>

Fl?via Lenzi, head of the doctors union in the adjacent state of Rond?nia, said she suspected the P1 variant was at least partly to blame for a surge in new cases, which have more than doubled during the past month in the state.

“We’re also seeing more serious cases and more cases involving younger patients,” Ms. Lenzi said. Last week, health authorities with the Yanomami Indian community in the northern Amazonian state of Roraima reported that nine children had died with Covid-like symptoms, although it was unclear if the new strain was the cause.

<snip>

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fast-s...ges-in-brazil-worrying-scientists-11612187591

Okieman Comment: This is a very good article and there is much more than the snips I have pasted up above. I purposefully chose these snips because they mention younger patients.

 

[kiwibird]

This ties in with the initial UK findings - "They also say it may explain a puzzling rise in serious cases of the disease among younger patients, echoing early findings on the U.K. variant. A U.K. government health-advisory panel said recently that studies point to a roughly 30% higher mortality rate among patients infected with the B.1.1.7 variant first identified there late last year."