Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil

Abstract

OVID-19 is a severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) that emerged in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China 1. The outbreak was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization on 30 January 2020. COVID-19 is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an enveloped, single-stranded positive-sense RNA virus that belongs to the Betacoronavirus genus and Coronaviridae family 2. SARS-CoV-2 is closely related genetically to bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses 3. Human-to-human transmission occurs primarily via respiratory droplets and direct contact, similar to human influenza viruses, SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus 4. The most commonly reported clinical symptoms are fever, dry cough, fatigue, dyspnoea, anosmia, ageusia, or some combination of these 1,4,5. As of 16 June 2020, more than 7.9 million cases have been confirmed worldwide, resulting in 434,796 deaths 6. Brazil declared COVID-19 a national public health emergency on 3 February 2020 7. After the development of a national emergency plan and the early establishment of molecular diagnostic facilities across Brazil's network of public health laboratories, the country reported its first confirmed COVID-19 case on 25 February 2020, in a traveller returning to São Paulo from northern Italy 8. São Paulo is the largest city in South America and no other Brazilian city receives a greater proportion of international flights 9. Currently, Brazil has one of the fastest-growing COVID-19 epidemics in the world, now accounting for 1,864,681 cases and 72,100 deaths, comprising over 55% of the total number of reported cases in Latin America and the Caribbean (as of 14 July 2020) 6. About 21% of Latin American and Caribbean populations are estimated to be at risk of severe COVID-19 illness 10. The region has been experiencing large outbreaks, with growing epidemics in Brazil,

Association between ABO blood groups and susceptibility to COVID-19: profile of age and gender in Iraqi patients

“…Among the 1014 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the proportion of males was higher than that of females (60 vs. 40%) and the male:female ratio was 1.5:1.0. Consistent with these findings, a Brazilian study reported that 57.5% of 67, 180 cases were males [31]. On the contrary, most of epidemiological reviews and meta-analysis studies reported comparable rates of COVID-19 between males and females, but males tended to have higher fatality and mortality rates than females [5,6,32].…”

Epidemiological, socio-demographic and clinical features of the early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Ecuador

“…As evidenced by the high R0 in the provinces closest to the start of the pandemic, where prevention measures were weak and scarce, due to multiple social and political factors. Likewise, other Latin American countries with deficient health policies and lack of timely actions, such as Peru and Brazil, obtained a higher average transmission potential of 2.97 [43,44] and 3.1 [45,46], respectively.…”

Inference of COVID-19 epidemiological distributions from Brazilian hospital data

“…Namely, they looked at the regional and ethnic distribution of the hospitalized patients [15,16], age-sex structure and clinical characteristics such as co-morbidities and symptoms [14,15]. Souza et al [14] show that 65.5% of cases are patients over 50 years old. Moreover, they also find that 84% of the patients reported having at least one underlying condition.…”

“…The SIVEP-Gripe database provides detailed patient-level records for all individuals hospitalized with severe acute respiratory illness, including all suspected or confirmed cases of severe COVID-19 reported by both private and public sector healthcare institutions, from small rural hospitals to large metropolitan academic centres [13][14][15][16][17]. The records include the date of admission, date of onset of symptoms, state where the patient lives, state where they are being treated, and date of outcome (death or discharge), among other diagnosis related variables.…”