Puerto Rico’s health, economy are suffering under pandemic

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico seemed to be sprinting toward herd immunity this spring before people began letting their guard down against COVID-19 and new variants started spreading

Now, a spike in cases and hospitalizations has put medical experts at odds with the government, which is struggling to protect people’s health while also trying to prevent an economic implosion on an island battered by hurricanes, earthquakes and a prolonged financial crisis.

“The difficulty here is how do you find a Solomonic decision … to give people the opportunity to work and be responsible and also maintain health as a priority,” said Ramón Leal, former president of Puerto Rico’s Restaurant Association. “These are hard conversations.”

It’s a delicate balance for an island that imposed a lockdown and mask mandates ahead of any U.S. state and has some of the strictest entry requirements of any American jurisdiction — measures that helped contain infections before the latest surge.

Overall, the land of 3.3 million people has reported more than 115,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, over 115,000 suspected ones and more than 2,000 deaths, with transmission rates inching up the last week of April to 28 cases per 100,000 people a day, compared with 17 per 100,000 on the U.S. mainland.

The pandemic has unleashed the second-biggest economic drop Puerto Rico has seen since recordkeeping began in 1980, according to José Caraballo, a Puerto Rico economist. The biggest was caused by Hurricane Maria, which inflicted more than $100 billion in damage in 2017, with nearly 3,000 people dying in its sweltering aftermath.

More than 30,000 jobs have been lost because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and at least 1,400 businesses have closed, Caraballo said — this on an island that saw nearly 12% of its population flee in the past decade and whose government is struggling with crushing debt that led it to file for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2017.

“I’m taken aback by what the people of Puerto Rico have had to endure,” Caraballo said.

Many of those who remain are mourning over lost homes, jobs, or loved ones.

Luis Ángel Sánchez has two close friends in the intensive care unit and lost his father and son to COVID-19 in April 2020 less than two weeks apart. Sánchez got vaccinated in mid-March.

“The vaccine will not erase the scars or heal my broken heart,” he wrote on Facebook that day.