Latin America, the region most affected by COVID and far from controlling it

After seven months with coronavirus, Latin America is the region most affected by the pandemic, with 33.8 per cent of the one million deaths already exceeded and 27.7 per cent of the 33.27 million global cases, and the area is still more concentrated on containing than exceeding the COVID-19.

A health system that was not prepared for such a crisis, with high hospital occupancy that in some cases has reached the limit of emergency, and a difficult economic situation in the world's most unequal region, which has also not allowed, for example, the ideal application of disease detection tests, are part of an explosive cocktail.

With 338,611 deaths and 9.2 million total infections, five of its countries are among the top 10 most affected: Brazil third (4.7 million cases), Colombia fifth (818,203), Peru sixth (805,302), Mexico eighth (733,717) and Argentina ninth (723,132), with Brazil (second, 142,058), and Mexico (fourth, 76,430) among the nations with the most deaths, above the United Kingdom, Italy, France and Spain.

In addition, Chile is on the verge of 500,000 cases and Ecuador, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and Panama over 100,000, and the cases have only decreased by 5 percent in the last seven days up to Monday.

But in addition to the raw data, there are other figures that show the complexity of the problem in the region. The most striking of all: Peru has the highest mortality rate in the world, with 99.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas the global average is 13 and the regional average is 53.

Other Latin American countries are above the regional average, such as Bolivia (68.3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), Brazil (67.2) Chile (66.7), Ecuador (64.9), Mexico (59.9) and Panama (55), according to the latest figures from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), based on data from the US Johns Hopkins University.

In Peru, the number of deaths up to this Monday was 32,262, and although the average weekly mortality rate has fallen to less than half of May and June and to the lowest number of deaths yesterday (62), it has never been possible to control the infection curve for the past four months and it was only four weeks ago that improvements began to be noted in the health sector.

There has even been much discussion about the country being in this situation despite the fact that it was the first in the region to have a strict quarantine, something that does not appear to have helped much in other highly affected nations which also applied similar early measures, such as Colombia and Argentina, which are only now taking steps to return to a certain degree of normality.

In Brazil, only surpassed in deaths in the world by the United States (142,058 against 205,031), deaths have dropped from a daily average of 1,030 two months ago to 750 in the last 14 days.

However, some authorities fear that the country is facing a second wave in states like Amazonas and Rio de Janeiro, the latter with ten days in a row seeing an increase in the average number of deaths, a situation attributed to the rapid de-escalation in several regions.

Mexico, the second most affected Latin American country, has an average of 591 deaths per million inhabitants in a country with nearly 130 million people, who have only 12 tests for the disease per 1,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest figures in the world.

In addition, from 76,603 deaths and 733,717 cases at present, it is expected that this will rise to 125,157 deaths and just over a million infections by the end of the year, according to the University of Washington, which shows that containment is still a long way off.

Argentina, for its part, extended last week and until October 11th  the "care measures" to curb the pandemic, looking at various provinces where the virus is advancing faster than in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, the most populated in the country and during the first months the most affected.

This is partly because intensive care beds are at 61.4% of their capacity, both with severe coronavirus patients and with other ailments, rising to 65.1% in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, and with an especially delicate epidemiological situation in the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba, Mendoza, La Rioja, Salta, Jujuy, Río Negro and Neuquén.

Chile, the twelfth most affected country in the world, began a gradual process of opening up, which has enabled the capital region to reach 97% of its population on Monday, although the pandemic is on the rise in other parts of the country, especially in the south, and the authorities do not rule out a resurgence as a result of the Independence celebrations on 18 September.

In a sample of gradual improvements in some places, Colombia reported on Monday 5,147 cases and 153 deaths, the lowest figures in two and a half months and after the reopening of almost all commercial activities.

However, a second wave is not ruled out in the near future, which could once again put departments like Amazonas, Chocó, La Guajira and Nariño, historically abandoned regions with precarious health systems, to the test.

Ecuador, which experienced a tough time in May in Guayaquil, the country's second largest city and which journalists called "the Wuhan of America" owing to the presence of dead bodies in the streets and the collapse of hospitals, has managed to stabilise the situation despite another spike in contagion in mid-August, when the epicentre moved to the province of Pichincha, whose capital is Quito.

Restaurants and retailers began to receive customers on Monday, and national aviation was revived on schedule towards a "new normality" in Panama.

In addition to the health crisis, which so far has left 111,277 people infected and 2,348 dead, the paralysis has led to the suspension of more than 260,000 contracts, of which some 62,000 have been reactivated as part of the gradual reopening, while the fall in gross domestic product (GDP) for this year is estimated at between 9 and 13 per cent.

Representatives of the restaurant and shopping centre sectors told Efe that 70% and 60% of these businesses are expected to open their doors, respectively.

Paraguay is an atypical case, from a country that initially had the situation under control but which, despite continuing to show comparatively low figures (803 deaths and 36,684 infections), in the last two months the situation has worsened.

"We are in a particularly important situation (...), we are at a turning point, this is the most key critical moment and it is very important that we can sustain all the appropriate behaviours," Health Minister Julio Mazzoleni said last Friday.

However, he stressed that there has been a slowdown in the last three weeks and that "the accelerated rise" of cases of deaths in the capital and in Central, the department that borders Asunción, the current red zone, "is tending to stabilise".

Despite the general picture, not everything is bad in Latin America and the Caribbean, as shown by examples such as Uruguay which, although it exceeded 2,000 cases on Sunday (2,010 up to Monday) and accumulated 47 deaths, is one of the countries with the lowest incidence of the pandemic in the region and worldwide: one death for every 100,000 inhabitants.

This allowed the small nation of 3.5 million inhabitants to carry out Sunday's departmental and municipal elections with relative normality, which adds to the fact that hotel establishments, shopping and cultural centres have been operating for a long time with reduced capacity and have recovered a good part of their face-to-face activities, although with distance and hygiene protocols.

Another positive case is that of Cuba, which seems to be moving towards controlling a recent resurgence of the pandemic, as indicated by the 26 new infections on Monday, fewer than in the previous days, for a total of 5,483 cases diagnosed and 122 deaths, with a lethality rate of 2.22 percent.

Caribbean islands such as Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines recorded no deaths, followed by countries such as Barbados, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (each with two deaths per 100,000 inhabitants); Jamaica (3), Trinidad and Tobago (5) and Belize (6).

However, in the cases of Nicaragua and Venezuela the official figures of the governments of Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro, respectively, are systematically questioned by their opponents, various NGOs and even international organisations, so it is not easy to know the reality of these countries.