Pregnant women and their unborn babies dying in Brazil as COVID deaths set to pass 500k mark
Brazil is likely to pass the awful mark of 500,000 COVID-related deaths in the next two days. Only the United States has a higher number of dead across the world.
Currently averaging 2,500 deaths a day, Brazil’s P1 variant has long been identified as a highly virulent cause for concern, prompting travel bans to most countries.
But researchers in Sao Paulo, one of the worst-hit cities in the country, say the P1 variant has started infecting and killing pregnant women and their unborn children in startling numbers.
Thais Ferreira de Lomes and her three-month-old baby Ezequiel, who has just been released from hospital
Currently 42 pregnant women die every week from COVID-19; many more women are being intubated and their premature children delivered by caesarean section without consultation with obstetricians, according to medical researchers at the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory.
Dr Rossana Pulcineli Vieira Francisco from the observatory said: “The virus transmissibility is higher with this variant and I think the big problem is that the health system for maternal care in Brazil is very bad.
“In some states the patient starts treatment in one hospital, a general hospital, and when her condition starts to worsen, and she needs to deliver the baby, she will be transported while intubated because they’re not at the right hospital to do the delivery.”
This, she believes, is part of the reason Brazil is seeing a higher rate of maternal mortality.
She says obstetricians and intensivists should be working together to find the right outcomes for mother and child, otherwise it will be very difficult to stop maternal mortality during COVID.
“I think we have more cases because of the variant, and because our maternal health system is very fragile, we have this result.”
People queueing for a COVID vaccine jab in Sao Paulo, but overall rollout in Brazil is slow
I asked her if it’s a perfect storm.
“Yes”, she replied, “and I think our only chance to stop this is the vaccine.”
The data from her and her colleagues’ research reveals that last year 10 pregnant women were dying each week from COVID-19.
This year, with the emergence of the new variant, the new figure is more than 40 per week.
Poor medical care and facilities already contributed to a high death rate for pregnant women in Brazil of 55 per 100,000 women. In Britain the figure is just 9.7.
But Dr Francisco says their research so far indicates that with COVID-19 as a factor the new number could double to over 100 per 100,000 by the end of the year.
The high overall transmission of the P1 variant (it accounts for nine in 10 coronavirus cases in Sao Paulo) combined with an overwhelmed health service, puts pregnant women at extreme risk.
When her kidneys failed the doctors told Thais she wouldn’t live to see her third child
The practice of intubating pregnant women and delivering the baby while the mother is in a highly stressed condition is criticised by the researchers as a “bad outcome” for both the mother and her child.
For their part, doctors working in overstretched public hospitals prioritise the life of the mother over the child and without extensive experience of intubating anyone, let alone pregnant women, they have little choice but to deliver the baby while saving the mother.
In Jardim Almeida Prado, a poor neighbourhood in the south of the city of Sao Paulo, Thais Ferreira de Lomes looks down at her tiny three-month-old baby Ezequiel, who has just been released from hospital.
Ezequiel was born 12 weeks prematurely, after Thais was intubated.
Previously fit and healthy, like most people, Thais and her family thought she was in no danger when the first symptoms of COVID developed, but they were wrong.
When her kidneys failed, the doctors said she wouldn’t live to see her third child.
She’s still scarred by her near-death experience – her uncle had died of COVID when she first got sick.
“It was great to come home, see my family, and know that God gave me the opportunity to live again,” she tearfully told me.
“Seeing so many people dying, so many people dying like my uncle died with COVID. Many people are dying with COVID.”
Even though she is over the worst of her experience, she is scared for her and her children’s futures, and worries Ezequiel might still get coronavirus.
“Even today I’m afraid because he’s tiny, he was born prematurely. I told my mother-in-law that it’s hard for me to look at him and not think that something might happen.”
Dr Patricia Sella, who treated Ezequiel, says the P1 variant is infecting young pregnant women like she hasn’t seen before
At the Graiau Hospital, the maternity ward and its premature babies section where Ezequiel was cared for, are currently free of COVID cases, but doctors and nurses have no expectation that it is going to stay this way – other hospitals in the city are still treating infants with COVID-19 and their sick mothers.
Dr Patricia Sella, the medical coordinator for gynaecology – and the doctor who treated baby Ezequiel – says she has no doubt that the P1 variant, sweeping across the country, is infecting young pregnant women like she hasn’t seen before.
“In 2021 we observed an increase in pregnant women affected by COVID, likely because of the new strain.
“In 2020, in our hospital mainly, we had a very small number of pregnant women with COVID, but this year we have at least one pregnant woman hospitalised with COVID every week,” she explained to me, standing in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
She puts this down to the high infection rate of the P1 variant.
“So, actually, I think that with the change in the strain, we saw that the inflammatory process, [and] the vasculitis caused by the virus is much greater, right, and that ended up changing, bringing it to pregnant women.
“[Pregnant women] already have decreased lung compliance due to the pregnancy itself and the evolution of the pregnancy. With the COVID infection, this ends up getting worse.
“What we observed is that this strain ended up infecting pregnant women who do not have any other pre-existing conditions, so they do not have hypertension, and do not have diabetes during pregnancy. We observed that there was an increase and an increase in severity of the cases.”
Douglas Silverio with his sons, Pedro, 5, and Bento, 3, and their sister, Maria Helena
In the middle-class suburb of Jardim America, Douglas Silverio proudly shows off the latest addition to his family, three-month-old Maria Helena.
She has two elder brothers Pedro, five, and Bento, three, who run around their home playing with toys while their grandmother prepares lunch.
She now lives with the family because her daughter and the children’s mother, Vanessa, is dead; killed by COVID-19.
Vanessa was just 33 when coronavirus struck.
Within five days she deteriorated and was intubated, and Maria Helena was delivered by caesarean section, coincidentally on her dad’s birthday.
Vanessa never recovered.
“I told my sons, ‘let’s say goodbye to her’.
“Pedro, who is five years old, cried too, and he said, ‘goodbye mother, you are going to heaven’.
“The youngest one did not understand what happened. And it was crazy, that was a crazy time, because we had prayed a lot for the baby, a lot of prayers from our family, but I was not ready to bury my wife in this process.”
Vanessa Silverio, 33, seen with husband Douglas, died from COVID while pregnant and her daughter was delivered by caesarean section
On the day Douglas held mass for his wife’s death, baby Maria Helena was released from hospital.
He wants everyone to fear COVID and to listen to the warnings about the disease.
“I miss my wife. And she was my friend, we had a lot of plans together.
“I get scared when I see on the streets some pregnant women without masks. I say to them please take care of yourself.”
The entire medical profession in Brazil now acknowledges that the only way to fight the virus and to stop the country being a petri dish for creating COVID-19 variants that will continue to threaten the world, is for the country’s vaccination programme to speed up and reach all members of society.
The rollout is currently very slow and so far has only started to include 56-year-olds in Sao Paulo.
Many in the profession directly blame the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, for the country’s poor response to the pandemic.
He still refuses to take the vaccine, has continuously played down the danger of coronavirus and still discourages the use of face masks anywhere.
The identification of the virus as a specific threat to young pregnant women has set off the alarm bells here that COVID-19 variants are attacking younger and younger members of society, who were previously thought to be relatively safe from serious illness.
China will evacuate 400,000 people over a super typhoon that slammed into the Philippines and Taiwan today.
Super Typhoon Ragasa, which is heading to southeastern China, has sustained winds of 134mph.
Thousands of people have already been evacuated from homes and schools in the Philippines and Taiwan, with hundreds of thousands more to leave their homes in China.
Filipino forecasters said it slammed into Panuitan Island off Cagayan province with gusts of up to 183mph on Monday.
More than 8,200 were evacuated to safety in Cagayan while 1,220 fled to emergency shelters in Apayao, which is prone to flash floods and landslides.
The projected route of Super Typhoon Ragasa, by the Japanese Typhoon Centre. Pic: Japan Meteorological Agency
Domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces hit by the typhoon, and fishing boats and inter-island ferries were prohibited from leaving ports over rough seas.
In Taiwan’s southern Taitung and Pingtung counties, closures were ordered in some coastal and mountainous areas along with the Orchid and Green islands.
Officials in southern Chinese tech hub, Shenzhen, said they planned to relocate around 400,000 people including people in low-lying and flood-prone areas.
Strong waves batter Basco, Batanes province, northern Philippines, on Monday. (AP Photo/Justine Mark Pillie Fajardo)
Shenzhen’s airport added it will halt flights from Tuesday night.
In Fujian province, on China’s southeast coast, 50 ferry routes were suspended.
According to China’s National Meteorological Centre, the typhoon will make landfall in the coastal area between Shenzhen city and Xuwen county in Guangdong province on Wednesday.
The International Space Station captures the eye of Typhoon Ragasa. (Pic: NASA/Reuters)
A tropical cyclone with sustained winds of 115mph or higher is categorised in the Philippines as a super typhoon.
The term was adopted years ago to demonstrate the urgency tied to extreme weather disturbances.
Ragasa was heading west and was forecast to remain in the South China Sea until at least Wednesday while passing south of Taiwan and Hong Kong, before landfall on the China mainland.
The Philippines’ weather agency warned there was “a high risk of life-threatening storm surge with peak heights exceeding three metres within the next 24 hours over the low-lying or exposed coastal localities” of the northern provinces of Cagayan, Batanes, Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.
Power was cut out on Calayan island and in the entire northern mountain province of Apayao, west of Cagayan, disaster officials said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties from Ragasa, which is known locally in the Philippines as Nando.
On Monday, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr suspended government work and all classes on Monday in the capital, Manila, and 29 provinces in the main northern Luzon region.
The rock has been hurled into the lake and now the ripples are spreading.
The UK and several other Western countries recognising a Palestinian state was never likely to be an action without consequences.
So what happens next? Well, firstly, a surge of angry rhetoric from across the Israeli political spectrum, almost all of whom described this as a victory for Hamas.
Gaza latest: Countries boycott French two-state solution summit
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “an absurd prize for terrorism” while Yair Lapid, leader of the opposition, described recognition as “a bad move and a reward for terror”.
Former defence minister Benny Gantz said it “emboldens Hamas and extends the war”, and Naftali Bennett, the man who may well usurp Netanyahu as prime minister next year, said recognition could lead to a “full-blown terror state”.
The forum that represents the families of hostages called it “a catastrophic failure”.
‘Annexation’ is incredibly complicated
So that’s unity in condemnation. But words are one thing; actions are another. And the more extreme ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet, who carry great weight, are coalescing around a single rallying cry – the demand is annexation of the West Bank.
It sounds blunt, but it is incredibly complicated. For one thing, simply defining what is meant by “annexation” is near-on impossible.
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UK formally recognises Palestine
The West Bank, which a growing number of Israelis refer to by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria, has been subject to Israeli military occupation since 1967.
In a sense, it is already partly annexed – the West Bank is dotted with settlements and outposts that are home to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. So annexation could mean supporting and expanding those developments.
Read more:
What recognising a Palestinian state actually means
Why UK’s Palestine move matters in the Middle East
Or annexation could mean sending in more soldiers, more equipment and taking more land, potentially in the Jordan valley.
It could mean pumping resources into the controversial and internationally criticised E1 settlement programme, which would divide the West Bank in half.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
But it could even mean the very thing that you probably think of when you hear the word “annexation”. It could mean Israel flooding the area with soldiers and claiming the land for itself – an invasion, in other words.
It might sound appealing to the likes of Israeli far-right politicians Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. At the same time, it would infuriate Arab nations, who are already seething that Israel chose to launch an airstrike on a building in Qatar to try, seemingly unsuccessfully, to kill Hamas leaders.
A loyalty test for the US
Full annexation would test the loyalty of the United States, which has, so far, supported Netanyahu through thick and thin. The attack on Doha has already prompted a mild rebuke; Israel’s government will not want to risk losing the backing of its most important diplomatic ally.
President Trump is due to meet Arab leaders on Tuesday, who will tell him of their fears for the future of the West Bank.
This will not be easy for Netanyahu. He has to balance the need to retain Trump’s friendship and support with a desire to dissuade other nations from recognising the State of Palestine, along with the need to keep Arab neighbours from turning against him while keeping Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in his cabinet.
So Netanyahu is going to bide his time. He will not make a decision on next steps until he has returned from visiting both the United Nations and the White House.
The immediate future of the West Bank might well be decided on a flight back from America.
A British-Egyptian activist who has spent years in prison has been pardoned by Egypt’s president, according to his lawyer.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah became a prominent campaigner during protests in Cairo in 2011 that led to the ousting of former president Hosni Mubarak.
In 2014, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison – later reduced to five – for protesting without permission.
He was released in 2019 but arrested again for sharing a Facebook post about human rights abuses in Egyptian prisons.
It led to another five-year term in 2021 for “spreading fake news”.
High-profile local and international campaigns have called for his release and Egypt removed him from its “terrorism” list last year.
Mr Fattah has British citizenship through his UK-born mother, Laila Soueif, who went on hunger strike over his case and met Sir Keir Starmer to push for her son’s freedom.
The 43-year-old also undertook multiple hunger strikes of his own to highlight his case.
Today his lawyer, Khaled Ali, writing in Arabic on Facebook, posted: “God is the judge. The President of the Republic has issued a decree pardoning Alaa Abdel Fattah. Congratulations.”
Mr el-Fattah’s mother (middle) at a protest calling for her son’s release in 2023. Pic: PA
His sister said on X that she and her mother were “heading to the prison now to inquire from where Alaa will be released and when”.
“Omg I can’t believe we get our lives back!” she added.
The Egyptian president’s office said another five prisoners were also pardoned – but it’s unclear exactly when they will all be freed.
Mr Ali said he expected his client to be released from Wadi Natron prison, north of Cairo, in the next few days.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah has spent nearly all of the last decade in prison. Pic: Reuters
Mr Fattah became known for his blogging and social media activity during the Arab Spring protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square 14 years ago.
But a wide-ranging crackdown on Islamists, liberals and leftists by the new president, former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, led to the activist being imprisoned for the first time.
During his second spell in jail, his family said he was locked up without sunlight, exercise and books – and abused by the guards.
Mr Fattah’s mother – a former maths professor – and lawyer father, who died in 2014, were also both activists.
Khaled Ali tried to get Mr Fattah freed in 2024, arguing his client’s two years of pre-trial detention should be counted, but prosecutors resisted and said he wouldn’t be allowed out until January 2027.
The refusal prompted his mother to begin another long hunger strike in September last year.
She only ended it two months ago following pleas from her family after she lost 35kg and became seriously ill.
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The activist’s mother lost 35kg during her most recent hunger strike. Pic: Reuters
Human rights groups say tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience have been incarcerated under the current president.
They allege they are denied due process and suffer abuse and torture – claims denied by Egyptian officials.
Chair of the foreign affairs select committee, the MP Emily Thornberry, said on X that she was “absolutely delighted” about Mr Fattah’s pardon.
She posted: “Laila, Mona, Sanaa and Alaa’s entire family’s tireless campaign for his release has been incredibly moving – their love for him was clear when I met Sanaa last year,
“I am so glad they will get to see him come home.”
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