Brazil Covid-19 variant deadlier for young people

Findings come as nation breaks infection records

The new coronavirus variant sweeping through Brazil, and spreading to other nations around the world, is proving to be up to three times more deadly for young people, according to research.

It is also spreading more quickly among younger people with cases among Brazilians in their 30s, 40s, and 50s up by 565 per cent, 626 per cent and 525 per cent respectively since the beginning of January, according to Brazilian public health institute, Fiocruz. In comparison, during the same periods the increase in the overall population was much lower at 316 per cent, suggesting the virus infections are making “a shift to younger age groups”.

There is also growing evidence that young people are not only more likely to get infected with the new strain — dubbed P. 1 — but also to die from it. The Brazilian Association of Intensive Care Medicine said that the number of 18 to 45-year-olds requiring intensive care for Covid-19 in February to March this year was three times greater than in September to November 2020, and coronavirus-related deaths in that age group have almost doubled.

The data showed a massive 193 per cent increase in coronavirus-related deaths for Brazilians aged 18 to 45, increasing from 13.1 per cent to 38.5 per cent, between the first and second waves.

On the frontline in Brazil, doctors and nurses are noticing an increasingly young cohort of Covid-19 patients filling beds.

“Last year, we had more critical elderly patients. Now, it’s completely distinct. We’re dealing with a substantial number of severe patients in their 30s to 50s,” Dr Anne Menezes from Getulio Vargas Hospital in the jungle city of Manaus, told Al Jazeera.

The variant is widely agreed to be more infectious and transmissible generally — by as much as 2.2 times — and 25 to 61 per cent more capable of reinfecting people who had been infected with an earlier strain of the virus, according to recent studies conducted by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in collaboration with Oxford University and Imperial College London.

It is now spreading in many nations around the world, and a high-profile series of infections in Canada is adding to significant concerns about how it affects young, healthy people. The Vancouver region has recently become a hotspot for the P. 1 variant, and more than half the players on the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team have tested positive.

At least 66,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19 in March — more than twice as many fatalities as the country’s second-deadliest month of the pandemic, July 2020.

Brazil was already the second-worst-hit nation by the pandemic after the United States, but things have slid even further downhill in the past month. Last Thursday, Brazil’s Health Ministry registered its highest daily Covid-19 death toll for the second day in a row, with the virus killing 3869 people.

The situation is so bad that Brazil now accounts for about a quarter of Covid-19 daily deaths worldwide. Experts predict it will only get worse amid a painfully slow rollout of vaccines and President Jair Bolsonaro’s attacks on efforts to restrict movement.