South America suffers worst death tolls yet

BOGOTA • In the capital of Colombia, Bogota, the mayor is warning residents to prepare for "the worst two weeks of our lives".

Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.

Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 per cent since January.

As vaccinations mount in some of the world's wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America - and in South America in particular - is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.

Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 per cent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 per cent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

Brazil recorded more Covid-19 deaths in the first four months of the year than in all of 2020, breaching the 400,000 mark as it grapples with a shortage of shots that is threatening mass vaccinations.

The Health Ministry reported 3,001 deaths on Thursday, pushing the total to 401,186 since the crisis started a little over a year ago.

Brazil went from 300,000 deaths to 400,000 in about a month, less than the two it took to go from 200,000 to 300,000.

Latin America was already one of the world's hardest-hit regions last year, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is more deadly than before.

The crisis stems in part from predictable forces - limited vaccine supplies and slow roll-outs, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.

But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side by side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the coronavirus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.

The length of Latin America's epidemic makes it even harder to fight. The region has already endured some of the strictest lockdowns, longest school closures and largest economic contractions in the world.

Experts worry that Latin America is on a path to becoming one of the globe's longest-haul Covid-19 patients - leaving public health, economic, social and political scars that may run deeper than anywhere else in the world.

"This is a story that is just beginning to be told," Mr Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation's Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.

"I have tried to be optimistic," he also wrote in a recent essay. "I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident."

If Latin America fails to contain the virus - or if the world fails to step in to help it - new, more dangerous variants may emerge, said Dr Jarbas Barbosa of the Pan-American Health Organisation.

"This could cost us all that the world is doing" to fight the pandemic, he said.

NYTIMES, BLOOMBERG