The SARS-COV-2 outbreak around the Amazon rainforest: The relevance of the airborne transmission

At the beginning of the SARS-COV-2 outbreak in Brazil, there was a striking difference between the contamination rate in the Amazonian States and the South and the Southeast States. The regions near the Amazon rainforest presented much higher and faster contaminations. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon through a global analysis of the COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil. It also investigates the relationship between climate conditions and airborne transmission with the evolution of contagion in the Amazonian states. The method of investigation of the spread of SARS-COV-2 in these different macro-environments was based on the analysis of three extensive daily official databases on the number of deaths, the percentage of adherence of the populations to the restriction policies, and the local climatic conditions. Besides, the social conditions in those States were also taken into account. Then, it was compared the epidemiologic results for States with very different climatic characteristics and that had adopted, almost simultaneously, similar social isolation measures. However, all these analyseswere not able to explain the remarkable difference in the evolution of the pandemic among Brazilian regions. So, itwas necessary to invoke airborne transmission, facilitated by the very high air humidity, as a decisive factor to explain the faster evolution of contagion in the rainforest region. Air humidity seems to be themost important climatic factor in viral spreading, while usual ambient temperatures do not have a strong influence. Another very important result of this analysis was the observation that the onset of collective immunity may have been achieved with a contamination rate of about 15% of the Amazonian population. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study found that the virus spreads faster in the Amazon region of Brazil, which could be attributed to the very high air humidity, rather than the usual ambient temperatures. Additionally, collective immunity may have been achieved in the Amazonian population at a contamination rate of about 15%.