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The new strain of covid-19 detected in Brazil, P.1, can have a viral load up to ten times higher and is capable of evading the immune system of those who already had antibodies, reveal two preliminary studies.
“It probably does all three things at the same time: it is more transmissible, it invades the immune system more and, probably, it must be more pathogenic,” Ester Sabino, professor at the Faculty of Medicine, told the Spanish EFE agency today. from the University of São Paulo (USP)) and coordinator of the USP group that participated in the research carried out by the Brazil-United Kingdom Center for the Discovery and Diagnosis of Abrovirus (CADDE).
The preliminary study, carried out by Brazilian and English researchers and released last Friday, suggests that the new variant detected in the state of Amazonas is between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than those that precede it and “probably” this is one of the factors. responsible for the second wave of the new coronavirus pandemic in Brazil.
The scientists also concluded that the new strain is capable of evading the immune system and causing a new infection in part of the individuals already infected with SARS-CoV-2, specifically between 25 and 61%.
“You can’t explain so many cases except for the loss of immunity,” said Ester Sabino, who coordinated the study with researcher Nuno Faria of the University of Oxford.
The preliminary study, based on a mathematical model carried out by Imperial College London, is based on the analysis of the genomes of 184 samples of nasopharyngeal secretions from patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in laboratories in Manaus between November 2020 and January 2021.
The capital of the state of Amazonas, Manaus, was one of the foci of the pandemic in Brazil, both in the first and second waves of the pandemic, and has been experiencing a health collapse since late last year due to the explosion. of cases and hospitalizations for Covid-19.
The research, which was supported by the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Fapesp), has not yet been reviewed by other scientists or published in scientific journals, but is available ‘online’.
Likewise, another study also disclosed last Friday by researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in the Amazon region indicates that the viral load in the body of individuals infected with P.1 can be up to ten times higher.
Brazil, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic in the world, accumulates 10,587,001 infections since the first case of the disease was registered, on February 26 of last year, and 255,720 deaths.
These figures confirm the South American nation, with its 212 million inhabitants, as one of the global foci of covid-19 and as the second country with the most deaths from the disease in the world, only surpassed by the United States, and as the third with more infections, behind the North American country and India.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 2,531,448 deaths worldwide, as a result of more than 114 million cases of infection, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
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