RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Delta variant of the coronavirus that caused an avalanche of new cases in the last months in countries in Europe, Asia, and in the United States, seems to be behaving in a different way in Brazil.
Here, four months after the identification of the first cases, the variant has not provoked a worsening in numbers of contaminations, hospitalizations and deaths. The numbers, on the contrary, are declining.
Virologist Fernando Spilki, the coordinator of the Coronavirus Network of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said to Valor newspaper that the devastating outbreak that Brazil experienced from Covid-19 in the first months of the year with mass contagion and also the progress in vaccination may be serving as a shield against Delta.
Read also: Scientific study from Israel shows natural immunity superior to Covid vaccine against Delta variant
According to a new Israeli study, the natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It’s the largest real-world observational study so far to compare natural and vaccine-induced immunity to SARS-CoV-2, according to its leaders.
It is therefore possible that the high infection rates at the beginning of 2021 have led to a much more solid immunity among the Brazilian population.
This should be kept in mind, especially in light of the possibility that new and even more contagious variants could soon be making the rounds.
According to the Israelis, there is no better immunity to any variant than the one which can be obtained naturally, via infection.
MINISTRY’S NETWORK
The ministry’s network brings together institutions around the country that perform genomic sequencing of coronavirus samples to identify which variants are in circulation. Corona-omics is one of the large networks of its kind in the country.
President of the Brazilian Society of Virology between 2019 and 2020, Spilki reminds that the percentage of those vaccinated with two doses although still around 30% already serves some protection. Associated with this, there was the peak of cases at the beginning of the year.
The identified cases of Delta in Brazil are still highly concentrated in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – where there is already a predominance of the variant among new cases.