Ross Clark Ross Clark

What we know about the Brazilian Covid variant

Rio de Janeiro during a lockdown (photo: Getty)

The World Health Organisation’s appeal to stop naming variants of Covid-19 after geographical locations evidently cut no ice with the Prime Minister, who warned MPs yesterday about a new Brazilian mutation of the Sars-Cov2-virus. Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance later suggested to ITV News that the changes identified in the new variant ‘might make a change to the way the immune system recognises it but we don’t know. Those experiments are underway.’

According to Pfizer last week, its vaccine still offers protection against the newly-identified Kent and South African variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. But should we now be worrying that the Brazilian variant will creep through our defences? The very name will be enough to cause alarm, because Brazil currently has the world’s second highest death toll from Covid-19, at 206,000 (although in terms of deaths per million population it falls behind Britain).

What’s particularly concerning is that the Brazilian strain is thought to potentially have originated in Manaus, and experts believe it could now be widespread there. The Amazon city is often singled out as the worst-affected place on the planet. Hopes that the epidemic there had burnt itself out after 20 per cent of people in the city had been infected – as I wrote here in August – have since been dashed by a revival of the epidemic. A subsequent study by the University of Sao Paulo published last month in Science magazine re-surveyed the population of Manaus and found that 44 per cent of the city’s population had antibodies to the virus in June. Adjusting for a decline in antibodies since the peak of the outbreak, the team estimates that 66 per cent of people in Manaus had had the virus by the end of June, and that 76 per cent had it by October.

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