South America sees sharp drop in infections
RIO DE JANEIRO — Just a few weeks ago, COVID-19 was spreading with alarm- ing ease across a cluster of nations in South America, overwhelming hospital systems and killing thousands of people daily.
Suddenly, the region that had been the epicenter of the pandemic is breathing a sigh of relief.
New infections have fallen sharply in nearly every nation in South America as vaccination rates have ramped up. The reprieve has been so sharp and fast, even as the delta variant wreaks havoc elsewhere in the world, that experts cannot quite explain it.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay and Paraguay experienced dramatic surges of cases in the first months of the year, just as vaccines started to arrive in the region. Contain- ment measures were uneven and largely lax because governments were desperate to jump-start languishing economies.
“Now the situation has cooled across South Amer- ica,” said Carla Domingues, a public health researcher who ran Brazil’s immunization program until 2019. “It’s a phenomenon we don’t know how to explain.”
There have been no new sweeping or large-scale con- tainment measures in the region, although some coun- tries have imposed strict bor- der controls. A major factor in the recent drop in cases, experts say, is the speed with which the region ultimately managed to vaccinate people. Governments in South Amer- ica have generally not faced the kind of apathy, politici- zation and conspiracy theo- ries around vaccines that left much of the United States vulnerable to the highly contagious delta variant.
In Brazil, which had a slow, chaotic vaccine rollout, nearly 64% of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, a rate that exceeds that of the United States. That led President Jair Bolsonaro, who had initially sowed doubts about vaccines, to brag last month.
“Brazil has one of the best performances on vaccination globally,” he said in a Twitter post.
In Chile and Uruguay, more than 70% of the population has been fully vaccinated.
As cases have dropped, schools in much of the region have resumed in-person classes. Airports are becoming busier as more people have started traveling for work and leisure.
The drop in caseloads led the United Nations last week to provide a more optimistic projection of economic growth in the region. It now expects economies in Latin America and the Caribbean to grow by 5.9% this year, a slight increase from its 5.2% estimate in July.
“We’ve managed to delay major circulation of the delta variant and move forward with the biggest vaccination campaign in our history,” Carla Vizzotti, Argentina’s health minister, said recently.
In Argentina, more than 61% of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Chrystina Barros, a health care expert at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said she worries that falling caseloads will lead people to become complacent about wearing masks and avoiding crowds while the pandemic remains a threat.
“There is a serious risk of putting the very effectiveness of the vaccine at risk,” she said. “The cooling of the pandemic cannot inspire people to relax in relation to the crisis.”