Fear has let go and hope is on its way back to the city of Serrana. At the same time, the coronavirus is ravaging the areas around the city and its approximately 45,000 inhabitants.
With nearly half a million deaths, Brazil is the second hardest-hit country in the world, beaten only by the United States. In terms of the number of infected, Brazil is in third place, after the United States and India. The figures are taken from Worldometers, which collects information from health authorities and institutes worldwide.
“Project S”
In the last 24 hours, the country has registered 39,637 new cases and 873 deaths, writes the American radio station WTVB on their websites. The figures show a decline over the weekend after seven days with 1800 daily registered deaths. But in one city, the reality is something completely different. Thanks to the medical experiment “project s”, Serrana is untouched by the ongoing wave of infections.
– Everything is open and the atmosphere has completely changed. The cities around us are in a very demanding situation, but right here it feels very safe, says restaurant owner Ricardo Luiz to CNN.
It has been four months since local authorities agreed to become part of a vaccine experiment. The project is the collaboration between the biomedical center Butantan Institute and Sao Paulo Medical University. The project aimed to fully vaccinate 95 percent of the city’s adult population in a couple of months. The catch is that everyone had to agree to take the hitherto unapproved vaccine candidate Coronavac. The potential vaccine candidate has been developed by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech, and is produced in Brazil, among other places.
“The main purpose of the project was to find out if we could control the pandemic without having to vaccinate the entire population,” director of the Butantan Institute Ricaro Palacios told CNN.
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Within three months, 95 percent of the adult population was fully vaccinated. Photo: Andre Penner / AP / NTB
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Has created an “immunity belt”
According to the researcher, one began to see the effect when about 70 percent of the selected group were vaccinated. The number of hospital admissions fell by 86 per cent, and the number of deaths by 95 per cent. The researchers’ theory is that the vaccination has created a kind of “immunity belt” in Serrana, which has protected the inhabitants even when the infection has ravaged the worst in neighboring towns. They point out that although this is a good sign for both the country and the rest of the world, it remains to have the experiment peer-reviewed. The population will thus not shrug their shoulders completely until the experiment has been declared a success.
But why exactly Serrana?
The small town is located 330 kilometers from the million city of São Paulo and is described as a sleeping town. This means that large parts of the city’s population commute to the nearby big cities to work. When Brazil was hit by a violent wave of infections in January, every twentieth inhabitant of Serrana was infected with the coronavirus. The local health service was unable to handle the infection pressure and the capacity was blown. At about the same time, the researchers decided to focus on the sleeping town as their test site.
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The model published by the Brazilian authorities shows how Serrana was divided into vaccine groups.
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The city was divided into 25 geographical groups, where it was decided that everyone over the age of 18 should be fully vaccinated in the period February-April. All the residents in a part of the city received vaccines first, so that the researchers could easily observe how the project degenerated in the small areas. By the time they reached the third geographical group, the infection was apparently under control. The researchers believe this may be a sign that mass vaccination of adults also protects the part of the population that has not been vaccinated, ie children and adolescents.
Now 95 percent of the city’s adult population has been vaccinated, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the country, where only 10 percent are fully vaccinated. Due to the precarious situation in the rest of the country, the inhabitants of Serrana wear face masks until the project has been peer reviewed and hopefully declared a success.
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