Ravages of coronavirus, economic hardships particularly harsh in Peru
Peru has more coronavirus cases and a worse death rate than any other country. It also had the biggest drop in GDP and the deepest recession. The informal economy was unable to complete the COVID-19 quarantines.
Katerin Facundo Livia lives in Lomas de Carabayllo on the northern outskirts of Lima with her mom, brother and 2-year-old son. When the coronavirus first hit Peru in mid-March no one left the house, remaining in quarantine. But after three weeks Livia’s family had burned through their savings on basic supplies and Livia was forced to break quarantine.
At 24 years old, she felt she had the responsibility to leave the house and bring food home, while insisting the rest of the family stay inside because she would be the most resistant to the virus.
Her family managed on what she brought home until late July, when her mom got a sore throat and fever. The test results came back positive. She had COVID-19.
“I was afraid of going out and bringing the virus home,” Livia said. “It hit me like a bucket of cold water because I said, in what moment did my mom get infected? I must also be infected.”
Peru is now the country with the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the world by most key metrics, despite having declared what came to be one of the strictest and longest quarantines in the world on March 15, when military and police flooded the streets to enforce stay-athome orders.
At one point, strict stayat-home orders were enforced by gender, with men and women allowed to leave the house only on alternating days of the week. A 10 p.m. curfew and all-day Sunday quarantine remain in effect in most of Peru.
But despite drastic early measures that were applauded by international health organizations and kept infection rates low early in the pandemic, Peru now has more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any other country in the world, with almost 30,000 deaths in a total population of about 33 million, double the rate of the United
States and Brazil.
In August, Peru surpassed both Brazil and the United States in total COVID-19 cases per capita and in confirmed deaths per capita. Peru now has one of the world’s highest infection rates, with more cumulative cases per capita than any country besides Qatar, Bahrain, Aruba, Panama, Chile and Kuwait.
Marcos Espinal, chief of the department of communicable diseases at the Pan American Health Organization, said that the outbreak in Peru has been so severe largely because “Peru is home to several population groups living in a situation of vulnerability,” and “with high informal economy where it is difficult to exercise social distancing.”
Lima’s streets and sidewalks are typically overflowing with vendors hawking goods to earn that day’s meal. The majority of residents buy their groceries in crowded markets. Two of Lima’s largest were closed in May after 80 percent of vendors tested positive for COVID-19. Public transport to the city’s poorest areas is primarily by vans that are themselves part of the informal economy, packing people in and taking residents high into the hills shantytowns on narrow dirt roads.
Carmen Diaz Flores, a doctor who does follow-up care for COVID-19 patients with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides healthcare to families like Livia’s who cannot get it anywhere else, said that the outbreak hit Peru especially hard because of a tendency after the first month to not take the pandemic seriously and the high levels of poverty that made it impossible to comply with the long quarantine.
“When we started going out in the first months there would be 10 or 15 people in one super tiny space, and this really helps propagate the disease. If I don’t have the necessary measures to isolate myself in my own home, I will infect everyone else,” Flores said.
Livia was terrified of bringing the virus home to her mom and young son and did her best to avoid the risks.
“I went out well protected and never entered the house with the same clothes. We don’t have potable water, we have a tank. I arrived home, bathed with the tank, took everything off, and left it outside,” Livia said.
“When I left the house it was out of necessity. … When you work day to day you aren’t guaranteed something to eat. The state has abandoned the people who need it the most. Lots of stimulus packages have come out, and my family hasn’t touched a single
the Peruvian currency. Peru is now also facing the largest drop in gross domestic product of any major economy, with a 30% decline from the previous year as a result of the government’s coronavirus measures and almost half of the formal sector in urban areas becoming unemployed, according to the National Institute of Statistics, INEI.
The government quickly passed a $26 billion aid package at the end of March, the largest in the region at the time, and worth about 12 percent of GDP, which included measures to give between $380 and $760 in to families in need.
Peruvian economist Hugo Nopo said that while aid packages were well designed in theory, they had serious implementation problems, primarily for Peru’s informal sector, which includes 72 percent of all workers, according to INEI.
Workers in the informal economy are not full-time employees and do not have benefits like health insurance or pensions.
Since these workers generally do not have bank accounts — only about 40 percent of the country does, according to International Monetary Fund reports — they deal in cash and do not pay taxes or receive social benefits distributed via the accounts. But this is the sector where most poverty is concentrated.
Livia’s family was scraping by on around 25 — about $5 — per day on what she was able to earn doing odd jobs.
Her mother recovered from the virus after a month of solitary confinement in a small wooden room at the front of her house with support from Partners in Health, but Livia is still the only one providing for her family during the crisis. She has a bank account and tried to get the “universal bonus” that was supposed to help low-income families like hers, but she said when she calls in, she gets put on hold or hung up on.
For many residents, getting enough to eat is now a greater concern than the virus.
“This pandemic is still affecting us in the economic aspect,” Edomia Paucarcaja said. She lives in Los Jardines in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho, one of the poorest in Lima. Los Jardines, like many neighborhoods in the district, wasn’t connected to the water or electrical system for years until the community banded together to set up the connection themselves. Now, few can afford to pay for it. Paucarcaja works in a government-run cafeteria that provides lunch to the community — the only meal many in the area get that day. “The economy doesn’t give the basics. We can’t afford to see a doctor, and food is scarce,” Paucarcaja added. “We worry about child malnutrition. I hope this pandemic passes quickly so we can be free.”
Fear and lack of access to medical services further alienated families like Livia’s who had someone test positive for COVID-19. Livia was turned away at the nearby medical posts in Comas that were already full of patients. When it became known in her neighborhood that her mother had tested positive for the virus, even buying supplies at the corner store became a challenge.
“The people in the neighborhood, and I understand, out of fear, they distance themselves from us,” she said. “I just want to go to the corner store and buy the minimum day’s milk for my son, and sometimes they don’t want to help me.”
Many residents of shantytowns in districts like Lomas de Cabayllo and Jardines, known as “young towns” in Peru, decided to flee back to their places of origin in the rural mountains or the Amazon.
Young towns got their name from their unplanned and improvised founding during the massive waves of rural-urban migration by those fleeing violence in the country’s internal conflict with Marxist guerrillas. Migrants squatted on land and set up shantytowns, trying to hold the land down until the titles became theirs by default. This means they are typically totally cut off from basic services.
During lockdowns, the economic situation became so precarious in urban shantytowns that thousands made the trip on foot to return to the harsh rural life they had previously fled. Although rural areas were spared during the first few months, the healthcare system in the countryside has since become overwhelmed, and even remote indigenous communities are facing widespread community transmission.
Ministry of Health statistics show that the Amazonian states of Loreto and Ucayali have the highest percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in the country, 31%, higher than the national average, suggesting that the number of cases is undercounted in the region. Lizardo Cauper, president of AIDESEP, an organization that advocates for development in the Amazon, reported to the Ministry of Health that “It is necessary to intervene urgently in the communities. COVID is advancing and is reaching the corners of our indigenous Amazon.”
Lino Huaman Meza of the Chahuaytire indigenous community works with CARITAS, a Catholic organization that helps the local governments bring aid to rural indigenous communities around Cusco, the urban center of the Andes region.
When Meza first traveled after the lockdowns were announced, he found that communities across the region had erected roadblocks and health checkpoints, totally barring outsiders from accessing the mountain villages, stringing white tarp, wood logs, and rocks across roads. Rural indigenous communities in the Andes often must travel hours to reach even a small medical outpost, so many took ensuring self-isolation into their own hands.
Lockdown measures were briefly lifted in July, but two weeks later, after cases continued to rise, they were reinstated in most of the country.
“In Peru, blocking public access is penalized. You can’t interfere with a road. You can’t limit access to a car. When there was a quarantine the villagers blocked the roads. In Cusco, there was low contagion because of this. When they lifted the quarantine all of the methods that the villagers used became illegal,” Meza said.
As the pandemic dragged on, many indigenous communities became infected after they were forced to end their community isolation, or when they welcomed relatives who fled Lima.
“Many people now don’t respect the quarantine out of economic necessity,” Meza said.
Now when many do make the trip to medical posts, they find them empty.
“Nobody can access medical attention in the communities. There is nobody in the health centers. They are empty,” Meza said. “There are many who die for lack of attention. In their homes, they are curing themselves with herbs. In the pharmacy they are buying medicine or oxygen, relying on their own money, and the government is doing little because now, in Peru at least, this has gotten out of control.”
FOR MANY PERUVIAN RESIDENTS, GETTING ENOUGH TO EAT IS NOW A GREATER CONCERN THAN THE CORONAVIRUS.