15% of the population of Brazil, one of the countries in the world most affected by the pandemic, has on average antibodies against the coronavirus covid-19 according to a seroprevalence study released Wednesday.
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The data revealed huge differences in seroprevalence rates among Brazilian states, from 9.89% in Ceará (northeast) to 31.4% in Amazonas (north), where the variant of the coronavirus known as P. 1.
This new round of the study, coordinated by the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Unifesp) and supported by the Fundación de Amparo a la Pesquisa del Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP), was carried out between January 25 and April 24 of this year, when the vaccination campaign in the country had already started.
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The results were obtained from the analysis of 120,000 people in 133 municipalities throughout Brazil.
“Less than 1% of the people tested claimed to have received a vaccine and practically none of them had received both doses”, explained in a note the professor of the Unifesp Marcelo Burattini.
Therefore, it is estimated that the vast majority of people who were detected antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 were due to having previously been in contact with the virus.
Brazil, which has about 212 million inhabitants, is the second country in the world with the most deaths associated with covid and the third with the most infected, accounting to date 454,429 deaths and more than 16.2 million positives in fifteen months of pandemic , according to the Ministry of Health.
Between the months of March and April, Brazil experienced the worst phase of the pandemic, with successive records of infections and deaths, and a large part of the public health system collapsed, a situation aggravated by the circulation of more infectious variants of the virus.
The maximum daily number of positives reached it on March 25, with 100,158, and that of deaths on April 8, when it reported 4,249 deaths related to the disease.
After a few weeks with lower figures, the country is currently experiencing a new upswing in positives that specialists interpret as the first sign of the arrival of a third pandemic wave.
The data published this Wednesday also confirm the worrying progress of the disease in the Latin American giant compared to the four previous editions of the study, which was carried out by the Federal University of Pelotas (Ufpel).
In the first round, from May 2020, the seroprevalence index in Brazil was 2.9%; in June the average rose to 4.6%, remaining stable in the third phase of the study.
In the fourth edition, at the end of August 2020, it fell surprisingly to 1.2%, a result that is being investigated by scientists.
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