LATIN AMERICA Virus charges beyond hot spots

QUITO, Ecuador — Beyond the hot spots of Brazil and Mexico, the coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm Latin American cities stretching from Chile to the Colombian Amazon in an alarming sign that the pandemic may be only at the start of its destructive march through the region.

More than 90% of intensive care beds were full last week in Chile’s capital, Santiago, whose main cemetery dug 1,000 emergency graves to prepare for a wave of deaths.

In Lima, Peru, patients took up 80% of intensive care beds as of Friday. Peru has the world’s 12th-highest number of confirmed cases, with more than 90,000.

“We’re in bad shape,” said Pilar Mazzetti, head of the Peruvian government’s COVID-19 task force. “This is war.”

In some cities, doctors say patients are dying because of a lack of ventilators or because they couldn’t get to a hospital fast enough. With intensive care units swamped, officials plan to move patients from capitals like Lima and Santiago to hospitals in smaller cities that aren’t as busy — running the risk of spreading the disease further.

Latin American countries halted international flights and rolled out social distancing guidelines around the same time as the U.S. and Europe, delaying the arrival of large-scale infection, said Dr. Marcos Espinal, director of communicable diseases at the Pan American Health Organization.

“Latin America was the last wave,” said Espinal, who previously worked at the World Health Organization.

He warned that authorities need to maintain anti-virus restrictions even as the U.S. and Europe reopen. Some of the hardest-hit cities, like Lima and Santiago, imposed strict, early lockdowns. But officials have struggled to enforce them, whether among the wealthy who are used to flouting regulations or lower-income people who depend on day labor or selling things on the street to feed their families.