Variant of the Delta circulating in Sao Paulo: health manager

The highly contagious coronavirus Delta variant is “already circulating” in Brazil’s most populous state, Sao Paulo, according to authorities in the country with the second highest death toll in the world on Wednesday.

The variant, which has increased the number of infections even in countries with high vaccination rates, “is already indigenous, that is, already circulating in our environment in people who have not traveled or have had contact with someone who had been, for example, in India,” said the health secretary of Sao Paulo, Jean Gorinchteyn.

The variant was first detected in India.

Brazil, where more than half a million people are found to have died from COVID-19, a toll in the United States alone, until last week saw just over a dozen isolated cases of Delta infections. all in people returning from India or who had been in contact with people who had been there.

On Monday, however, the city of Sao Paulo reported the first case of an alleged local transmission, in a 45-year-old man who had not recently traveled abroad.

The next day, two more cases were reported in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The World Health Organization announced Wednesday that the world had exceeded the threshold of four million coronavirus deaths.

Brazil, with 212 million inhabitants, experienced a particularly devastating second epidemic wave between January and April due, in large part, to the Gamma variant first detected in Manaus, in the northern state of the Amazon. .

To date, the South American giant has recorded more than 526,000 coronavirus deaths. But the daily mortality rate has flattened in recent weeks – from about 2,000 in mid-June to 1,600 last week.

The Delta variant, more transmissible than any previous strain, has already been found in about 100 countries.

© 2021 AFP