Oppsiktsvekkende funn i Brasil, der en ny virusvariant snur opp ned på antakelser i Manaus. Området ble hardt rammet tidligere i fjor, i slik utstrekning at man mente det var oppnådd flokkimmunitet, utfra antallet som var smittet (3/4 av befolkningen).
Nå er mange blitt smittet for andre gang. Varianten vekker stor bekymring. Portugal var tidlig ute og stengte for reisende fra Brasil. Storbritannia tar ingen sjanser og stenger for reisende fra Latin Amerika og Portugal:
LONDON (AP) — The United Kingdom is banning travel from the whole of South America and Portugal amid concerns over a new variant of the coronavirus in Brazil, authorities announced Thursday.
apnews.com
Fra ScienceMag:
When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus—more than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again.
“It was hard to reconcile these two things,” Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence. On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.
www.sciencemag.org