Virus gains steam across Latin America

MEXICO CITY — By late March, the Mexican government calmly predicted that its coronavirus outbreak would peak in April.

A few weeks later, it changed its prediction to mid-May.

And then to late May. And then to June.

Now, with new infections surging and the government facing growing anger, even ridicule, over its constant guesswork, many Mexicans have drawn their own conclusion: No one really knows.

“Obviously, prediction is not a guarantee of precision,” Hugo López Gatell, the federal health official in charge of the nation’s virus response, has acknowledged.

Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, has quickly become a focal point of the pandemic, a worrisome frontier for a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 460,000 people and infected more than 9 million worldwide.

The coronavirus was always going to hit Latin America hard. Even before it arrived, experts warned that the region’s combustible blend of inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers living day to day and health care systems starved of resources could undermine even the best attempts to curb the pandemic.

But by brushing off the dangers, fumbling the response, dismissing scientific or expert guidance, withholding data and simply denying the extent of the outbreak altogether, some governments have made matters even worse.

Months have passed since the pandemic struck Latin America, but unlike in parts of Asia, Europe and the hardest-hit cities in the United States, the virus is only gaining steam across the region. Deaths have more than doubled across Latin America in a month, according to the Pan American Health Organization, and the region now accounts for several of the world’s worst outbreaks.

In recent weeks, Brazil has often recorded the world’s highest number of new infections and daily deaths — and shows no signs of slowing down. Peru and Chile now have more cases per capita than the United States. Cases continue to climb in Mexico, which recently became one of the few countries anywhere to hit 1,000 deaths or more in a single day.

In many ways, the faltering, scattershot approach to the pandemic in parts of Latin America resembles the disorganized approach in the United States — with some presidents in the region questioning how dangerous the virus is, championing unproven, baseless or even dangerous remedies, clashing bitterly with state governors and refusing to wear face masks in public.

And as the virus storms through Latin America, corruption has flourished, the already intense political polarization in some countries has deepened and some governments have curtailed civil rights. In El Salvador, thousands of people have been rounded up, many for violating stay-at-home orders, despite the Supreme Court’s demands that the detentions end.

Economies already stretched thin before the virus lie on the precipice of ruin. Millions are out of work, with millions more at risk. The United Nations has said the pandemic could result in a drop of 5.3 percent in the regional economy — the worst in a century — forcing some 16 million people into extreme poverty.

“In a matter of months, we could lose what we have gained in 15 years,” said Julio Berdegué, the regional representative for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro spent months downplaying the threat of the virus — calling it a “measly flu” and railing against shutdowns imposed by governors — epidemiologists say the death toll could surpass the total in the United States to become the world’s highest by late July.

In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has suggested that a clean conscience helps ward off infection — “no lying, no stealing, no betraying, that helps a lot to not get coronavirus,” he recently told reporters.