While people in parts of the U.S.
and Europe are trying to go back to life as "normal," in most of Latin America,
there's no avoiding the brutality of the pandemic day to day.
Colombians have developed a hospital bed that converts to a coffin.
In Peru, patients face ongoing shortages of medical oxygen.
In Ecuador, bodies were piled on the side of the street.
And all over the region, new coronavirus variants are wreaking havoc.
Despite only being less than 10% of the global population,
Latin America accounts for a quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in the world.
So how did COVID get so bad in Latin America?
No region in the world has been hit harder by the pandemic than Latin America
and the Caribbean — a region with 650 million people
spread across 33 countries.
These countries include
a diverse range of ruling parties and public health systems.
There are several factors that explain why COVID has been so brutal in the region.
We have a very uneven continent.
We are not a rich continent.
We don't have money to give this
economical support like rich countries can do.
Latin American countries face deep social inequality and poverty.
Almost 4.5% of the region's population
lives on less than $1.90 a day.
And a fifth of Latin America's urban population lives in informal housing.
Over 100 million people are working in the informal sector — such as street vendors,
taxi drivers and farmers — which means many people had to choose
between going out to work or not having enough money to survive.
So enforcing quarantines was unsustainable.
The quality of health care in the region is also uneven.
While some nations in Latin America have strong health care systems,
others were unprepared for the pandemic after decades of underinvestment
in their health care sectors.
Some countries, like Mexico, faced severe oxygen shortages.
In Bolivia, for example, ICU beds were fully occupied.
And in Nicaragua, rights groups say health care workers
were fired for calling out the president's mishandling of the pandemic.
On the other hand, in some countries like Chile, where cases had been
relatively low, the government failed to keep restrictions in place
long enough and claimed victory against COVID too early.
By late December 2020, Chile and many other Latin American countries
eased lockdowns for holiday celebrations, even as cases continued to surge.
But many experts blame one president for the devastating death toll
throughout the region.
Brazil's Bolsonaro.
This pandemic also
brought a pandemic of misinformation.
Misinformation like this tweet from Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
He dismissed COVID-19 as "a little flu,"
even after testing positive for the virus.
He discouraged social distancing and never implemented a countrywide lockdown.
Meanwhile, the virus was spreading so fast in his country that in April 2021,
a person was dying from COVID every three minutes.
The country's location in the region has also played a role in
how the pandemic has spread.
Brazil is massive: It spans almost 3.3 million square miles and shares
borders with 10 of the 15 countries and dependencies in South America.
This is why health officials believe sharing a border with Brazil
contributed to the spread and emergence of new variants.
We are not like New Zealand. We are not an island.
It's much, it's much more difficult
to control your borders.
Take Uruguay, a country of some 3.5 million people.
In 2020, Uruguay was seen as a global model for dealing with the pandemic.
It had developed an aggressive testing strategy using its own kits.
It had a strong contact-tracing system.
And citizens voluntarily stayed at home, even without an official lockdown.
Working with colleagues to take the initiative,
and we started doing that directly.
Those three things — testing, tracking and isolating —
kept Uruguay's transmission number very low in 2020.
There were several days that Uruguay reported no new infections,
resulting in fewer than 100 deaths from COVID in 2020.
But now, Uruguay has one of the highest death rates per capita in Latin America.
So what went wrong?
The Gamma variant.
Twice as infectious of the original strain, Gamma
first appeared in Manaus, Brazil, in November 2020.
It quickly spread to the rest of the region.
By February 2021, 80% of cases
in the Uruguayan border city Rivera were the Gamma variant.
And by June, nine out of 10 cases in Uruguay were Gamma.
But that's not the only COVID strain ravaging the region.
In Colombia, the Mu variant now makes up 39% of new COVID-19 cases,
and it has spread to 49 states in the U.S.
In Peru, the Lambda variant accounts for more than 90% of new COVID-19 cases.
It went largely undetected because it was often mistaken for Gamma.
As of early September 2021, it has spread to 39 countries,
15 of them in Latin America.
We don't know a lot of it because
the main research is done in [the] U.S. or in Europe.
And that variant it's not stipulating over there.
So we are sort of looking up into the North Hemisphere,
but what is going on here in the South, it's different.
We need to know [what] to do.
We know we need to get every single person
in the world vaccinated.
That's the thing.
And the problem is
that we are very far away from that.
And then there's the issue of vaccinations.
Only one in four Latin Americans have been fully vaccinated.
But there is disparity in the region between who is getting vaccines.
In Uruguay, more than 70% of people are fully vaccinated.
But in other places like Haiti, less than 1% of the population
have been vaccinated.
Experts have consistently warned
that unequal access to vaccines will likely prolong the pandemic.
It would take Paraguay 454 days to vaccinate 10% of its population
at its current rate of vaccination, compared to 21 days in the U.S.
or 89 days in India.
There've also been multiple scandals involving preferential access to vaccines,
especially in Peru,
where government officials secretly got doses before they were available to the public.
The vaccine shortage in Latin America is also largely due
to wealthy countries buying up the world's supply of vaccines.
Fifteen million doses have gone to waste in the United States alone.
But despite these challenges,
there are some positive signs.
I believe that the government of Chile
have a very good deal with the vaccination,
and they bought vaccines many months before.
So that give us the possibility
to have different brands.
And we're using actually
four different kind of vaccines.
And that's one of the good things.
And on the same perspective,
Chile's a country that had
a very strong vaccination program before all that,
for kids, for example,
or for adults vaccination program.
So it was easy to distribute the vaccines
all over the territory.
That was very good.
Because only a quarter of Latin America's population has been vaccinated,
there are efforts to increase collaboration among countries
to support regional vaccine production,
which would also be beneficial to combat diseases and pandemics in the future.
But even with positive signs, many are warning against complacency.
And Dr. Cortés says vaccination alone will not end the pandemic.
Things like masks and ventilation, plus
vaccines, are the most important things.
And we should think that we are going to keep
using masks indoors for a long time.
So if we want to stop this,
we need to think globally.
And this is a pandemic,
so it affects everybody in the world, every single country.
And everybody needs to get a vaccine.
That's the only way
we're going to go through this.