Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: São Paulo gives more booster vaccine than second dose against Covid-19

In December, São Paulo has vaccinated more people with booster injections than with second doses. There are 183,000 booster doses per day, compared to 81,000 people who complete their vaccinations.

This is partly good news, as well as understandable. Earlier this month, there were more people able to take the booster (11.7 million) than people needing dose 2 (4 million). But it must be emphasized that it is still necessary to vaccinate these 4 million people, almost all of them young people under 20 years of age. At the current rate, the population of the state would have been fully vaccinated (with a second or single dose) only in mid-January. It’s late.

And? Look at the scale of disgrace in Europe and the US; look at the omicron. We have to tame this epidemic before this plague enters its third year.

São Paulo has the highest vaccination coverage in the country: 91% of the population aged 12 and over is fully vaccinated, compared to 74% in the rest of Brazil. There are states with very low coverage: Roraima and Amapá with 50% of the population fully vaccinated, Pará with 59%, Maranhão and Acre with 61%.

But at the moment, São Paulo also has a higher daily death rate: 1.2 per million inhabitants, compared to 0.82 per million in the rest of the country. One explanation could be that the state has bigger cities, more movement and agglomeration of people, more airports and travel in general, etc. There is no data to affirm that underreporting is greater in other states.

More importantly, for the whole country, the travel season and holiday and holiday gatherings will begin. Some virus will spread. Among them, the omicron variant.

We still know next to nothing about the omicron. It is hypothesized to cause less serious illness, but it could also be that the variant may be less harmful because it faces bodies already partially immunized by vaccines and previous infections.

However, on Friday, a UK government bulletin said that omicron is spreading rapidly there and, next week, could be responsible for half of new infections. If this variant spreads fast, it will soon reach people without full vaccination and the most fragile and susceptible in general (older people and with pre-existing disease that makes them more defenseless, such as cardiac and diabetics).

The epidemic is different in each country, of course. In Brazil, we had many more infections than in Europe (we have more “natural” protection), we have a vaccination rate similar to that of large countries, our vaccination is more recent (“stronger”, for now), we face different variants and we started to give the booster dose (11% already “reinforced” on average in Brazil, 16% in São Paulo). But it is still not possible to measure the size of the risk of suffering from new variants.

The epidemic is causing a lot of disgrace in Europe, not least because of the delta. In Germany, the number of deaths per day is 9.5 per million inhabitants, now more than ten times that of Brazil. In the US, 4.3 per million. In the UK and France, just over 2. Governments are increasingly likely to demand vaccinations, with growing protests from recalcitrants.

Brazil does not require a vaccination certificate for tourists, although the entry criteria for foreign visitors must be tightened, despite Jair Bolsonaro. The government of São Paulo went to the Supreme Court to ask for the international vaccine passport.

This containment helps. The main thing, however, is to vaccinate a lot, quickly and require masks. Every day, São Paulo hospitals admit 270 new Covid patients in their ICUs. The disease still kills 58 people a day in São Paulo; 200 in Brazil (6 thousand per month!).