U.S., poorer nations drive virus surge

America among countries showing few signs of control

When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide.

So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day.

The novel coronavirus — once concentrated in specific cities or countries — has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking havoc in multiple major regions at once.

But the impact is not being felt evenly. Poorer nations throughout Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa are bearing a growing share of the caseload, even as wealthier countries in Western Europe and East Asia enjoy a relative respite after having beaten back the worst effects through rigorously enforced lockdowns.

And then there’s the United States, which leads the world in new cases and, as with many nations that possess far fewer resources, has shown no sign of being able to regain control.

Nearly all the countries struggling with a surge share something in common: After weeks or months of trying to suppress the virus, they reopened their economies, only to find that the virus came roaring back. Now they are

using a more limited arsenal to contain the spread, with little success.

“Let me be blunt: Too many countries are headed in the wrong direction,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared in Geneva this week. “The virus remains public enemy No. 1, but the actions of many governments and people do not reflect this.”

The severity of the toll on the United States was evident in new infection figures released Tuesday, with multiple states — including Oklahoma and Nevada — hitting record highs. Florida has now reported more cases in the past week — nearly 78,000 — than most European nations have in their entire struggle with COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

That sort of explosive growth is mirrored in other nations, though none with the sort of wealth, infrastructure and scientific know-how of the United States. Across much of the developing world, rampant coronavirus outbreaks came relatively late. But now that the virus has taken root, governments are flailing in their attempts to halt it and citizens are resisting changes to their way of life.

“As restrictions have been lifted, we’re going back to a new normal,” said Alain Labrique, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist. “But this virus is still circulating. There are still high rates of susceptibility. We have to continue wearing masks and being smart about crowd activities. The new normal is not the old normal.”

The struggle has been especially fraught in Latin America, where countries have been lashed by COVID-19’s ferocity and many have not yet hit their peaks. Brazil currently has the second-highest number of covid19 deaths in the world, at more than 74,000, while Mexico has the fourth-highest, with more than 37,000. (The United States, with at least 133,000 deaths, is far and away the global leader.)

With their high levels of poverty and inequality, Latin American countries were more vulnerable to the pandemic than wealthier nations. An estimated one-fifth of people in Latin America and the Caribbean have at least one of the health conditions that puts them at higher risk of catching the virus.

Many couldn’t afford to stay home for long periods. In Mexico, for example, more than half of workers are employed in the informal economy — as street vendors, gardeners, construction workers — surviving largely on their daily earnings. And people living in cramped homes and densely packed neighborhoods found it hard to isolate.

Mexico ended its 70-day lockdown May 30 and began to gradually reopen, maintaining a stateby-state system of restrictions depending on conditions.

As with the U.S., though, cases are surging in Mexican states where reopening has moved especially rapidly.

“The risk is that the opening, the end of quarantine, is moving too fast, that it’s not orderly, that people aren’t obeying the health measures, that they’re not social distancing,” the country’s coronavirus czar, Hugo López-Gatell, recently told reporters.

Health experts say renewed lockdowns would be beneficial in places where numbers are spiraling. But there is little political will.

In the Middle East, most governments were relatively swift to lock down during the earliest days of the pandemic, averting the sudden and deadly surge of infections seen in Europe and the United States. But the restrictions exacted a heavy economic toll, and few countries show any inclination to revert to the stringent measures of a few months ago even though coronavirus rates are rapidly climbing.

The number of cases reported in the region in June alone was higher than during the previous four months combined, WHO Middle East director Ahmed al-Mandhari told reporters this month.

The region, he said, is entering “a critical threshold,” having exceeded 1 million cases and 25,000 deaths. Over half of those are in three of the region’s most populous countries: Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The rate of new infections in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt has begun to slow in recent days. But Iran, with over 262,000 cases, has consistently struggled ever since it became an early global epicenter in March.

Countries that have seen their infection rates jump in recent weeks are continuing to open up. Egypt is inviting tourists to come back, including to the pyramids. Saudi Arabia has severely restricted travel to the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca but has not reimposed any of the lockdown measures that had earlier kept citizens indoors.

Russia, too, has held firm to its decision to lift most of its restrictions in late June. Russia continues to post more than 6,000 new infections per day, adding to a total of more than 735,000 — the world’s fourth-highest. But those daily figures are well below the country’s peak of more than 11,000 daily in May.

Countries across Western Europe — including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany — have also seen sustained declines. Not so in some Eastern European countries, however, where experts say outbreaks have been driven by government decisions to hastily drop restrictions — including on mass events such as soccer matches.