Under pressure of COVID-19, Venezuela a ticking time bomb waiting to explode
According to Venezuela’s official statistics, the country has one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world. In reality, Venezuela may be the biggest untold coronavirus story around — and a time bomb ready to explode.
In my interview with Venezuela’s National Assembly President Juan Guaidó, who is recognized by the United States and more than 50 other countries as his nation’s legitimate president, he told me that Venezuela “is on the threshold of a catastrophe.” Much of the population lacks soap to wash their hands, and many hospitals don’t have running water, he said.
According to President Nicolas Maduro’s regime, Venezuela had only 10 coronavirus-related deaths by April 27. In comparison, Brazil had 4,205 such deaths by that day, Mexico 1,351, Peru 728, Ecuador 576, Colombia 243, Chile 198, Argentina 186 and Cuba 54, according to the University of Oxford’s Ourworldindata.org
website.
On a per-capita basis, the Venezuelan regime claims to have only 0.35 COVID-19 deaths per 1 million people. In comparison, Brazil has 21 COVID-19 deaths per 1 million inhabitants, Mexico
11, and Argentina 4.3, according to Ourworldindata.org. The Oxford website compiles countries’ official figures.
When I asked Guaidó about the regime’s COVID-19 death figures, he responded that, “They don’t have any credibility.”
Guaidó admitted that, like North Korea or Cuba, Venezuela had the relative advantage of being virtually isolated from the rest of the world when the pandemic started earlier this year. Before the pandemic, international flights to Venezuela had already plummeted to about 10 percent of their numbers two or three years ago, he said.
Guaidó also conceded that Venezuela’s widespread gasoline shortages have brought domestic travel within the country to a near halt, which could have slowed down transmission of the virus.
Amazingly, Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, but two decades of Hugo Chavez’s radical leftist populism has destroyed oil production, along with the rest of the country’s industries.
But, whatever the real
COVID-19 death figures are, there are powerful reasons to believe that Venezuela is on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster, Guaidó told me.
First, a majority of Venezuelans lack soap and running water — both essential to the handwashing required to stop the virus’ spread. According to an April 26 poll, commissioned by the National Assembly, 78 percent of Venezuelans don’t get water on a regular basis, and 20 percent have not received water during the past seven days.
Second, hospitals are depleted. Almost 50 percent of Venezuela’s hospitals don’t have regular running water, nearly 80 percent don’t have enough soap and many hospitals have electric power outages, Guaidó told me.
“Venezuela’s biggest children’s hospital, the J.M. de los Ríos hospital in Caracas, recently spent nine hours without electricity,” he said. “Nurses can’t get to their work places because there is no gasoline or public transportation, and they only make about four dollars a month.”
Third, Venezuela conducts only 100 coronavirus tests a day, which is almost nothing, Guaidó said.
Fourth, Venezuela has only about 300 ventilators in the entire country, of which only 83 are in staterun hospitals, Guaidó said.
“If COVID 19 starts spreading in Venezuela, the hospital system will be almost immediately saturated,” Guaidó said.
Now, more than ever, Venezuela needs a transition government to restore democratic rule and open the gates to massive international aid, because most major countries will not want to send money or medical equipment to a corrupt dictatorship, he added.
My conclusion after talking with Guaidó and other well-placed Venezuelans is that Maduro’s dictatorship is most likely undercounting the country’s COVID-19 deaths by classifying them as caused by pneumonia and other diseases. It is also likely that COVID-19 may have been slower to arrive in Venezuela than in other countries, as Guaidó said, because of its isolation from the rest of the world and its internal isolation.
The Pan American Health Organization estimates that Latin America is six weeks behind Europe in the spread of COVID-19. If that’s the case, Venezuela may soon become the biggest COVID-19 catastrophe in the Western hemisphere.