Venezuela detects cases of Brazilian variant of COVID-19

President Nicolás Maduro announced on Wednesday that Venezuelan health authorities detected the first ten cases of the COVID-19 variant whose emergence is attributed to the Brazilian city of Manaus.

Maduro specified in a brief televised statement that the cases were detected at dawn: two in Caracas, a couple more in the neighboring central state of Miranda and six infections in the southern state of Bolívar, bordering Brazil.

“We are obliged to take special measures,” said the president, noting that the variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, known as P.1, apparently the variant is more contagious, “more dangerous, more serious.”

That variant was first identified in four travelers who were in Brazil and who were routinely tested at the airport outside of Tokyo, Japan.

“I do not want to create scaremongering,” the motivation is to “inform” and take special actions to “redouble the measures” of protection in public and private spaces to stop the chain of infections, Maduro added, without giving details.

Other variants of the new coronavirus are circulating globally.

The detection of the variant was confirmed 13 days after the start of the vaccination process after the arrival in the South American country of a first batch of 100,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. On Monday, meanwhile, Venezuela received 500,000 doses of the Vero vaccine. Cell from the Chinese state company Sinopharm, donated by Beijing.

The first to receive the Russian doses were health workers.

With the arrival of immunization, teachers are incorporated into the initial vaccination process, a priority sector after the government’s decision to resume “face-to-face classes” in April under strict biosafety measures.

The first two cases of the new coronavirus in Venezuela were detected on March 13, 2020. In total, there are more than 139,900 infections and 1,353 deaths.

Experts argue that the low number of cases compared to other countries in the region is largely due to the isolation that the country is experiencing after years of political, economic and social crisis.

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