Today, a leading Brazilian institute launches a test to detect new variants of the coronavirus. Bolsonaro tries to get back into the market’s good books, while his son gets off the hook in a corruption investigation.
Detecting new variants in real time
The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Brazil’s flagship federal biological institute, has developed an RT-PCR test allowing health authorities to detect infections by new variants of the coronavirus in real-time. The new test identifies mutations commonly found in the Manaus, South Africa, and UK variants — which are more contagious than previous versions.
- The foundation ran trials during Carnival and can now perform up to 500 variants-based diagnoses per day. Five Brazilian states from multiple regions will be the first to have access to the technology, which will be expanded as production capacity increases.
Why it matters. In multiple Brazilian states, Covid-19 patients are requiring longer hospitalization times, suggesting that they only seek care once infections have grown more severe. “Faster detection of different variants allows for better epidemiological controls,” says Felipe Naveca, deputy director of research and innovation at Fiocruz-Amazon.
Vaccines. Meanwhile, the Pfizer vaccine became the first coronavirus immunizer to obtain full regulatory clearance in Brazil....