A city in Brazil where covid-19 ran amok may be a ‘sentinel’ for the rest of the world | MIT Technology Review

A city in Brazil where covid-19 ran amok may be a ‘sentinel’ for the rest of the world | MIT Technology Review

When COVID-19 runs unchecked

The city of Manaus, Brazil, might help to reveal what the terrible toll of coronavirus looks like when the virus rages almost unchecked. A preprint study, not yet peer reviewed, shows that between one in 500 and one in 800 people in the city died of the disease. Manaus is fairly young, with just 6% of its population over the age of 60 (in the United States, it’s around 20%). Researchers tested samples from blood banks and estimated that up to 66% of the city’s people have been infected, which they say helped to finally bring down the death rate despite conditions, such as overcrowding, that allow the virus to spread easily.

MIT Technology Review | 6 min readReference: medRxiv preprint