While Europe is preparing hurriedly for a possible second wave of covid-19 infections, South America is yet to see the end of the first.
Four months since governments began national lockdowns in March, the spread of covid-19 shows “no signs of slowing down” across the Americas, said Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO),.
South America already has , with Brazil having recorded more than 2.8 million confirmed cases, Peru more than 435,000, Chile more than 360,000 and Colombia more than 330,000. The region has .
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The real situation is also probably far worse than government figures suggest. For instance, reports claim that .
“Case totals are really unknown because the testing regime has been difficult to implement,” says Michael Touchton at the Covid-19 Policy Observatory for Latin America at the University of Miami, Florida.
Brazil, which has , had tested 11.93 per 1000 inhabitants as of 31 July. The UK had tested 140.86 per 1000 and Germany 95.56.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has come under fire for underplaying the danger of the virus, not locking the country down, insufficient testing and tracing and not requiring the use of face masks.
“You’re going to continue to see an explosion of cases and no flattening of the curve, plus a huge undercount [in Brazil],” Touchton says.
Though the region’s largest countries have reported the highest number of cases, PAHO is particularly concerned with Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, where infections continue to surge despite swift lockdowns being implemented in March.
There is little to no economic safety net for the workforce – around half the working population of South and Central America and the Caribbean are in informal and often low-income employment, . As such, these countries have struggled to enforce lockdowns.
What’s more, to ease economic strains many governments have begun relaxing lockdowns and reopening their economies in recent months, despite being far from of having positive test rates of 5 per cent or lower for covid-19 for at least 14 days before reopening.
“In many of these countries herd immunity might occur before a vaccine is readily available, at least for a large percentage of the population,” says Touchton. “This is very discouraging, as this will cost thousands and thousands of lives, but I don’t see a way out right now, especially for countries with low health capacity, and especially those where the national government is opposed to testing and tracing, much less enforcing physical distancing.”
Colombia reimposed lockdowns in several neighbourhoods of its capital on 13 July following a spike in cases. ICU units there are now bordering on capacity and the country reported more than 10,000 cases and 367 deaths on 2 August.
Like other South American countries seeing an uptick in cases, Colombia’s government didn’t use the time bought by lockdowns to develop a testing and tracing regime and reopened too quickly, says Carolina Corcho at the Colombian Medical Federation.
“It’s a situation of a vertiginous increase due to these wrong decisions that were taken,” she says.
The outlook for South and Central America during the pandemic has become increasingly bleak in recent weeks, as the virus continues to proliferate while patience has run out with measures used to control it.
The population in South and Central America and the Caribbean is particularly vulnerable. Some 186 million people – three out of every 10 people – are at risk of developing severe covid-19 illness due to underlying conditions, developed by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine working with PAHO.
And the region’s poorest countries will probably be some of the last to receive a potential vaccine, say public health experts.
