Bad News From Brazil.
Back in April, COVID-19 hit the city of Manaus, Brazil, extremely hard. In fact, the outbreak there was arguably the worst in the world. One study, published in the journal Science, estimated that so many people were infected that the city could have reached herd immunity — that the outbreak there slowed down because up to 76% of the population had protection against the virus.
Now the city of Manaus is seeing another massive surge in cases. This time around, the outbreak appears even larger than the first one, says Marcus Vinicius Lacerda, an infectious disease doctor at the Fundação de Medicina Tropical Doutor Heitor Vieira Dourado in Manaus. "You have much more people becoming infected and that includes people inside their [newly diagnosed patients'] households," he says.
The surge is so large that hospitals have run out of oxygen, and patients on ventilators, who need extra oxygen to breathe, have literally suffocated in hospital beds. "I'm really afraid. I'm seeing lots of people dying, people that should have had better support in the hospitals," Lacerda says.
In many ways, this resurgence in Manaus doesn't seem to make sense because such a large proportion of the population was infected just last spring. In theory, these earlier patients should now be immune to the coronavirus. So why is the city seeing such a huge surge?
The answer could lie in a newly discovered variant....continues
