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Although only eight percent of the world’s population lives in Latin America, 30 percent of corona deaths come from there. Now comes the next wave.
113,000 people have already died from the pandemic in Mexico: relatives visit the grave of a dead crown in Mexico City.
Photo. Edgard Garrido (Reuters)
For nearly 500 years, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been helping devout Catholics in sickness, poverty, and need. Therefore, the apparition of Mary is venerated throughout Latin America. Every year on December 12, devotees make a pilgrimage to the huge basilica, which was built in Mexico City in honor of the Virgin. But now the doors of the sanctuary are closed, thousands of policemen have blocked the streets. People may need Our Lady’s help this year, but during the pandemic a pilgrimage with several million participants would be insane even in deeply Catholic Mexico.
More than 113,000 people in the country have already died from the pathogen, only in India, Brazil and the United States there have been more deaths. At least at the end of July it seemed that the infection curve was slowly dropping. But now, six months later, the number of infections is greater than ever. “The situation is very worrying,” said the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a few days ago.
Beds are running out in Paraguay
And it’s not just Mexico that is a cause for concern in South America. The number of cases is also increasing again in Brazil. In Paraguay, beds are increasingly scarce in emergency rooms, and in Chile’s capital Santiago, residents can only leave their homes on weekends with special permission. “We are very concerned,” said Chilean Health Minister Enrique Paris in early December. The second wave could be “much stronger than the first.”
The virus has affected the region between Tierra del Fuego and the Rio Grande more strongly than almost any other in the world. Although only eight percent of the world’s population lives in Latin America, 30 percent of Covid-19 deaths come from here. There are structural reasons for this: there is great poverty, many people do not have permanent jobs and cannot afford to stay at home.
Politicians are complicit: in Brazil, for example, President Jair Bolsonaro played down the virus for a long time.
Photo: Adriano Machado (Reuters)
But politics is also partly to blame. The presidents of Mexico and Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Jair Bolsonaro, played down the virus for a long time, rejected strict measures and reintroduced relaxation from the beginning. Brazilian gyms and beauty salons reopened, although the infection curve has yet to flatten. And even if the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico is canceled, restaurants and shopping centers are still full.
Now high hopes are pinned on vaccines. Mexico approved the use of the compound by Pfizer-BioNTech last week. The first vaccines must start before the end of the year. However, experts wonder how the country and many other states in the region plan to carry out a large vaccination campaign when most governments and health systems have no longer managed to contain the virus.
In fact, countries like Argentina or Ecuador were bankrupt even before the pandemic began.
The organizational effort involved in mass immunization is immense, as is the technical challenge in some cases. Some vaccines must be cooled to temperatures well below freezing; there are currently only facilities for this in the largest metropolises in Latin America. Doses must also be paid for, as countries like Argentina and Ecuador were already bankrupt before the pandemic started.
Only Brazil is one of the few countries in the region that has a well-developed vaccination system. The country has already run large campaigns successfully in the past, and it could also benefit from this in the fight against coronavirus, provided, however, people are also willing to get vaccinated. In a survey by the renowned Datafolha Institute, around a quarter of Brazilians said they did not want to be vaccinated
