Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro in Brasilia, February 1, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino.
São Paulo, Brazil: On January 10, 2021, Japanese health authorities informed their Brazilian counterparts that four tourists who had just returned home with symptoms of COVID-19 after a trip to the Amazon were carrying a new variant of SARS-CoV-2. It was not, according to the Japanese, an ordinary mutation: the new strain represented 12 mutations, including one change in the protein that allows the virus to enter human cells.
While that made it similar to the mutations found in the UK and South Africa, it was probably more contagious.
The report from Japan surprised scientists at Brazil’s leading health institutes. Almost a year ago, they scientists had taken just 48 hours to sequence the genome of the virus after Brazil reported its first case, on February 25. But now, as a more contagious mutant was spreading through Manaus, the capital of Amazon state, the scientists were in the dark about the mutations.