South America Hub – Brazil
📍Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This Hub has made considerable headway in community engagement within Brazil. The team engaged with the favela of Complexo da Maré, a socially vulnerable community in Rio de Janeiro consisting of 140,000 inhabitants. An intervention combining communication, surveillance, and telehealth, with a strong community engagement component, was able to reduce the COVID-19 mortality and increase case detection in this large Rio de Janeiro community. These findings show that investment in community-based interventions may reduce mortality and improve pandemic control in vulnerable communities from LMICs.
The team have also established an ongoing follow-up programme that analysed data on approximately 800 post-COVID confirmed cases until December 2023. Research in this community of this magnitude has never been previously undertaken. The team’s community activities have been exceptionally valuable to the community; not only has there been an increase in the awareness of COVID-19 amongst the population, but also managed to increase the accessibility to vaccines. To that end, a substantial number of individuals have received their COVID-19 vaccine (93.4% coverage with 2 doses in adults in the community).
Fernando Bozza
Hub Lead, Chair of Executive Board
Dr Bozza coordinates the critical care and infectious disease research on the largest integrated hospital network in Latin America (IDOR-Rede D’Or São Luiz). The network is present in ten Brazilian States and comprises 63 hospitals.
Dr Fernando Bozza’s research activities involve clinical and translational research on severe emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and the neuro-cognitive consequences of severe infections. He has also acted in the consolidation of collaborative clinical research initiatives in Brazil and Latin America, such as the Brazilian Intensive Care Research Network, where he was the founder and first president.
Dr Bozza’s research group has made significant contributions to managing emerging infectious diseases, including studies on dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and COVID-19. Bozza has more than 250 peer reviewed papers, including publications in high-impact journals such as NEJM, JAMA, Nature, Lancet Infectious Diseases, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Emerging infectious diseases, etc.
Furthermore, Dr Bozza is grantee of the ICODA (International COVID-19 Data Alliance) Challenge, supported by Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) the and Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, being Principal Investigator of the EFFECT-Brazil project, which aims to evaluate the COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Brazil using statistical and machine learning models. His team comprises biomedical researchers, physicians, epidemiologists, engineers, and statisticians.
Areas of experise
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Publications
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Read research from this Hub
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News from the South America Hub
Long COVID: tackling a multifaceted condition requires a multi- disciplinary approach
The Lancet Infectious Diseases published the GloPID-R and ISARIC Long COVID Forum Working Group’ letter, describing the content and discussions of the Long COVID Forum which took place on 9-10 December 2020.
Characterisation of the first 250 000 hospital admissions for COVID-19 in Brazil: a retrospective analysis of nationwide data
“These regional differences in mortality reflect differences in access to better health care that already existed before the pandemic”, explains Fernando Bozza, study coordinator and researcher at the National Institute of Infectious Disease.
Development and validation of the ISARIC 4C Deterioration model for adults hospitalised with COVID-19: a prospective cohort study
The QCOVID is a new risk prediction tool that uses readily available information about people, such as their age, ethnicity and whether they have certain comorbidities to help identify individuals at highest risk of developing severe illness.