The death toll from COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean passed 1 million people on Friday, Pan American Health Organization Director Carissa F Etienne has said.
Since the virus was first detected in Sao Paulo in February 2020, over 1,001,400 fatalities, nearly 30 percent of the global total have been recorded, yet Latin America and the Caribbean is home to just 8.4 percent of the global population.
“Almost 89 percent of the deaths occurred in five countries: Brazil (44.3%), México (22.1%), Colombia (8.3%), Argentina (7.3), and Peru (6.7%). Three percent of the deaths were concentrated in Central America and 1 percent in the Caribbean,” it added.
“More than one million lives have been cut short because of Covid-19. This is a tragic milestone for everyone in the region,” Etienne said last night. “This pandemic is far from over, and it is hitting Latin America and the Caribbean severely, affecting our health, our economies, and entire societies,” she added.
Particularly distressing is the fact that only 3 percent of the population in the region has been fully vaccinated, says Etienne, seeing as most of the countries depend on a global fluctuation in vaccine supplies.
Suffering the consequences of mismanagement
From Mexico to the Brazilian metropolis of São Paulo, the coronavirus pandemic has swamped healthcare systems in many countries that were ill-prepared for the impact of the virus, according to Reuters.
In many of the hardest-hit countries, people died because of under-funded hospital systems, or lack of oxygen supplies, while in some countries where people are already living hand-to-mouth, lockdowns were difficult to enforce.
With cases falling in Europe, Asia, and North America, and flat in Africa, South America is the only region where new infections are rising rapidly on a per capita basis, according to Our World in Data. Although India is currently struggling through one of the world’s worst outbreaks of the pandemic.
Health officials and epidemiologists are pointing out that the pandemic took unprepared governments by surprise last year – and the impact on the population was made worse by leaders who downplayed its severity of the pandemic and failed to secure timely vaccine supplies.
“Instead of preparing for the pandemic, we minimized the disease, saying the tropical heat would deactivate the virus,” said Dr. Francisco Moreno Sanchez, head of the COVID-19 program at one of Mexico’s main hospitals and a critic of the government’s vaccination plan.
“Unfortunately, we are among the most-affected regions, where the handling of the pandemic has been the most mistaken, and now we are suffering the consequences,” the epidemiologist told Reuters.
But Mexico is not alone in being unprepared for a major health crisis. The government of far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a vaccine skeptic and opponent of lockdowns is also reeling from the mistaken guidance of its leader.
With the highest death toll in the region, Brazil remains the third most-affected country in the world in terms of confirmed COVID-19 cases, behind only India and the United States.
