How a small city in Brazil may reveal how fast vaccines can curb Covid
The city of Serrana in Brazil is a living experiment.
The picturesque place, surrounded by sugarcane fields, is nestled in the southeast of one of the countries hit hardest by COVID-19. By the end of March, daily deaths in Brazil surged to 3,000 on average a day, a high in a pandemic that has claimed more than 405,000 lives there — the second worst death toll of any country in the world behind only the United States. And as vaccines slowly trickle into the country, only about 15 percent of the population has gotten at least one shot.
Except in Serrana. There, nearly all the adults have gotten their shots. What happens next in this city could provide a glimpse of what the future of the pandemic could be — not only in Brazil but across the globe as vaccinations pick up.
The mass vaccination is an experiment dubbed Projeto S, which will measure the real-world effectiveness of the Chinese-made CoronaVac vaccine, including how well it protects against coronavirus variants. One variant called P.1, which first emerged in the Brazilian Amazon and is now widespread throughout Brazil, shows signs of being both more contagious and able to evade antibodies trained to recognize the coronavirus (SN: 4/14/21).
Among the questions the study may help answer is “whether vaccinated people protect the unvaccinated, how long does their immunity last, and what variants are circulating,” says Marcos Borges, project coordinator and director of the Serrana State Hospital. “We’ll finally be able to observe how a large set of people respond to the vaccine in real-world conditions.” [Continue reading…]