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The proliferation of the new coronavirus on a large scale in the cities of the Amazon region nullified the hypothesis initially raised that covid-19 could lose strength when it reached the warmest regions of the planet. Amazonas and Amapá, states that register high temperatures, lead the proportional classifications of deaths and cases in the country, according to data from the Ministry of Health.
With about 300 thousand inhabitants, the Río Negro and Solimões region, in Amazonas, is the one with the highest mortality rate in the country, with an index of 251.7 per 1 million inhabitants. The survey was conducted by Twitter based on data published the day before yesterday (9) by the ministry.
But why didn’t this theory that heat kill the virus not work? The Twitter I listened to two of the best researchers in Brazil about the new coronavirus to understand the behavior of the virus in the warmer areas of the country.
According to Felipe Naveca, researcher of virology and molecular biology at the Fiocruz (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz) Amazônia, the heat may even be reduced, but “it is not enough to stop a pandemic like this.”
“In Manaus, for example, it is always hot. There are a few days when you feel a milder climate here, and that was not enough to prevent transmission. We even had many hot days earlier in the year, and still we have a transmission at the top, “says Naveca. He coordinated the first study in the North to sequence the new coronavirus extracted from a patient in the state of Amazonas.
The Fiocruz researcher explains that the cold generates a tendency to increase the transmission of a respiratory virus, because people spend more time indoors.
“Due to the cold, they tend to be fuller, in a more closed environment. Here in the Amazon it is never cold. We only have a wetter season, at the beginning of the year; in the second semester, we have a drier climate.” Then it shows that [a temperatura alta] it didn’t work, “he says.
Naveca points out that other respiratory viruses are common in the Amazon region, with the proliferation of diseases at this time of year.
“As much as it is not the same transmission as in the southeast, as we see mainly in the state of São Paulo, here we have the transmission of respiratory viruses at this time of year, between April and May. That is, in the warmer seasons there may even be less transmission, but not to the point of not happening, “he says.
Summer virus outbreaks
According to Luiz Goes, researcher at the Microbiology department of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and the Pasteur Scientific Platform of USP (University of São Paulo), the progress of the new coronavirus under the heat of the Amazon is not surprising.
“What we observed in the Amazon proves what I already suspected from the research I did,” says the scientist, whose doctoral thesis addresses the types of coronaviruses already circulating in human species. “In my thesis, I analyzed the presence of the four endemic coronaviruses in a sample of children with acute respiratory infection, for 14 years. We saw years when the viruses had outbreaks in the summer,” he says.
Góes claims that viruses from the same family had already adapted and proliferated in much warmer areas than the Amazon, and there was strong evidence that this would happen again with the new coronavirus.
“MERS [Síndrome Respiratória do Oriente Médio] of events overflow [termo usado para definir quando um vírus consegue migrar de uma espécie hospedeira para outra] of camels for humans occurs mainly in Saudi Arabia. Hotter than that, impossible, “he concludes.
