Victory over covid
After vaccination, 95% of the adult population of a small Brazilian city returns to normal life
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
After vaccination, 95% of the adult population of a small Brazilian city returns to normal life
Schools have opened in the city of Serrana and large outdoor concerts are planned, and medical workers have time for normal meals instead of quick snacks with street food in rare free minutes, the press release of the Instituto Butantan Immunization of Serranas population with Butantans vaccine has a high decline of 80% cases and 95% in deaths by COVID-19.
These are signs of the onset of normal life, which are in stark contrast to what is happening in the rest of Brazil, where hospitals are overcrowded and private businesses are mostly closed, and 2,000 people die every day in the country from COVID-19.
Serrana, a town of 45,000 people located in the state of Sao Paulo, began to come to life as a result of an experiment called Projeto S, which involved vaccinating almost all of its adult residents. Now in Serrana, the number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 and mortality from this disease have fallen sharply. The number of cases of covid with symptomatic course decreased by 80 percent, and hospitalizations – by 86 percent. In March, the hospitalization rate was at a peak of 600 cases per 100,000 people.
Among those who received both doses of the vaccine, only two people were admitted to the hospital with covid two weeks later, the project managers reported at the end of May. The death rate from covid for every 100,000 people has also fallen by 95 percent, although this is still raw data. According to the City Health Secretariat, only six deaths from covid were recorded in Serrana in April.
In the Projeto'S experiment, 95 percent of the adult population of the city was vaccinated with a Chinese vaccine CoronaVac, which allowed us to evaluate its effectiveness, including the ability to protect against coronavirus variants. In clinical studies, the effectiveness of CoronaVac was slightly higher than 50 percent, which raised doubts about its effectiveness in real conditions.
"This project is important because it demonstrates the ability of a vaccine with relatively low efficacy to significantly reduce mortality in practice," says Melanie Fontes-Dutra, coordinator of the COVID-19 data analysis network in Brazil, who was not involved in the project. The results of the experiment also showed that the vaccine is effective against a more contagious version of the virus, which is designated R.1, this is the so-called Brazilian version. It prevailed in Serrana by the beginning of the study.
Despite the fact that the figures obtained are preliminary and they have yet to be processed to verify the effectiveness of mass immunization, even these data suggest that the vaccine is effective, Fontes-Dutra emphasizes. In her opinion, the most important thing now is to increase the number of vaccinated people as much as possible.
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