Coronavirus: Peru worries about the lambda variant

Peru is the country with the highest mortality rate from the pandemic in the world. Now virologists are particularly concerned about the new Lambda variant. However, there is a lack of resources and data for sound monitoring.

By motorcycle, by donkey or in a wooden canoe: Peru’s nursing staff take a lot to vaccinate the population. Denesy Suasaca and her team are on their way at an altitude of 3800 meters to the floating reed islands of the Uros on Lake Titicaca. It is a long way to go, she says – “but it is important that all people have access to a vaccination against Covid-19”.

After a slow start, Peru’s vaccination campaign is slowly picking up speed. Even so, only eleven percent of the population have received the second dose so far. In a country that has suffered more deaths per capita as a result of the pandemic than any other in the world.

The situation is dramatic, says Padre Juan Goicochea; the health system has collapsed and the pandemic has “relentlessly” disclosed the failures of the past decades. Goicochea’s parish is located in a poor district of Chorillos, the port district of Lima. Even the hospitals in the capital ran out of oxygen and people died on the streets. Cemeteries couldn’t keep up.

This trauma is deeply rooted, even if the numbers have recently declined somewhat: “Everyone here has lost relatives, lost their jobs, had to go into debt to pay for treatments or oxygen. There were corruption scandals and fraud. Politics was not up to the crisis , people feel left alone. ”

“We grope in the blind”

The South American country has also been in a political crisis for months. The last elections reflect this: Two extreme candidates faced each other, the left-wing outsider and former village school teacher Pedro Castillo won with a wafer-thin margin over the right-wing populist Keiko Fujimori. His first announcement now: vaccinate more and faster. Because there is great concern about the next wave.

A new variant is spreading in Peru: Lambda. Microbiologist Pablo Tsukayama isolated it for the first time in December 2020; it is now responsible for 80 percent of new infections in Peru and spreads in more than 29 countries worldwide. Tsukayama cannot yet give a well-founded answer to how dangerous it is, he still has too little data – there is “far too little monitoring of the variants in the region”.

And there are hardly any studies on the Chinese vaccines, which are used most here. How effective they are against the variants, asks Tsukayama and states: “We are groping in the blind.”

The perfect breeding ground

South America is the perfect breeding ground for new virus variants and thus also a risk for those countries that have already immunized large parts of the population, says the microbiologist. He calls for more vaccine solidarity and a global strategy in monitoring the virus. Because from Around two million pieces of data on genome sequences of the corona virus came from South America today, only 30,000. The rich countries, Tsukayama urges, should also help to better monitor the virus in the poor countries: “It’s getting started very slowly, but there is still no global strategy.”

The scientist observes that a lack of information, coupled with distrust of politics, fueled the population’s skepticism about vaccinations. Rumors are currently circulating on social media that vaccination is a secret tool used to harm Peru’s rural and indigenous people. Nazario Charca from the Uros community on Lake Titicaca appeals urgently: “I invite everyone to be vaccinated!”