What you need to know about the new Manaus coronavirus variant

The world looked on in horror last week as the Amazonian city of Manaus faced a second collapse of its local health system under the variant of a second wave of coronavirus contagion. With an extreme shortage of oxygen cylinders in the city’s hospitals, intensive care patients had to be manually ventilated by already overworked medical staff. Many Covid-19 sufferers died from suffocation in what was the lowest point of Brazil’s coronavirus epidemic to date.

Besides a series of factors — including insufficient planning and national coordination and the loosening of social distancing in the city — experts say that one of the explanations for the devastation seen in Manaus is that a new variant of the coronavirus is now circulating in the Amazon region.

On Friday, Brazil’s Health Ministry confirmed a case of Covid-19 reinfection with a new variant of the virus in the state of Amazonas. The patient is a 29-year-old woman who was initially infected in March of last year. Her second diagnosis was confirmed at the end of December.

The results of her Covid-19 test identified a mutation of the coronavirus, previously discovered by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare and deemed to have originated in...