PAHO: Brazil Has Not Overcome Pandemic, Needs to Advance Testing

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Marcos Espinal, Director of the Department of Communicable Diseases of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), said on Tuesday, August 11th, that Brazil still has “a high rate of positives in Covid-19 testing, over 20 percent of the total in some states”. In view of this, he said it is “crucial to continue to implement” tests, increasing their availability on national soil. “We must ensure that the tests are widely available to the population,” he said.

During a press conference, Espinal said that some recent data might show that the contagion curve in Brazil would be heading toward “a flattening”. However, according to him, the country’s figures also suggest “inconsistency” and would show the need to increase testing in order to have a clearer picture about the disease. “Let’s not think that Brazil is free of the problem,” he warned.

Espinal said taking the size of the territory into account is needed, with some regions in a worse situation than others. He mentioned the “high number of cases and mortality” in states such as “São Paulo, Minas Gerais and others”. “It is not yet a curve that we can say is flattened,” he said about the general picture of new cases on Brazilian soil.

Jarbas Barbosa, PAHO’s assistant director, spoke about the Mexican situation. According to him, the country also needs to increase efforts to test more suspected cases of the disease. “There are states in Mexico with a very strong trend for Covid-19 growth,” he noted.

At another point in the press conference, Barbosa was asked whether the BCG vaccine, which has been applied to infants to prevent tuberculosis and leprosy for a century, could provide some form of immunity for the novel coronavirus. According to him, the subject is the target of several studies, but there is no finding to support this conclusion to date. “No one who has taken this vaccine should consider themselves safe against Covid,” he said.

Source: Estadão Conteúdo