In the coming days and weeks, the coronavirus will hit Latin America hard. The data and curves indicate that the pandemic will grow at rates similar to those previously seen in Asia and Europe. But unlike in the industrialized countries, the continent faces the crisis in worse starting conditions: with substantially lower health spending, with fewer beds and doctors per person than in those countries, and without the ability of China to mobilize resources and impose measures. drastic isolation to its citizens. The only advantage is that the virus comes later. And that there are lessons from the failure (and relative successes) of other countries that should be taken into account to mitigate, to the extent possible, an unprecedented not only health but also economic and social catastrophe.
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The responses, so far, have been mixed. At one extreme is Colombia, which is in total quarantine from today until April 13, after Bogotá ordered a mandatory simulation of isolation that emptied the streets of the populous capital. Colleges and universities have been closed for a week now. Argentina has acted in a similar way. On the contrary, in Mexico, the authorities have not yet taken any mandatory isolation measure until Monday, beyond bringing forward the Easter school holidays, after some educational institutions already made decisions - closure, distance education - because of their account and without waiting for guidelines. Both extremes illustrate the anguish that grips Latin American rulers. Drastic measures of isolation leave broad layers of the population in the most absolute precariousness (56% of employment in Mexico is informal), who live day by day and who are deprived of all sustenance from the suspension of economic activity. Poverty also kills. And the Mexican authorities, for example, follow the evolution of the contagion curve and experiences in other countries to try to determine when they will have to intervene - and not before - to mitigate the ravages of the pandemic without throwing them into extreme poverty. to millions of fellow citizens.
Unfortunately, the ups and downs in the statements of its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, do not help the country as a whole to assume the magnitude of the challenge. Worse is the case of Jair Bolsonaro, engaged in a political fight with the governors of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (between the two States they concentrate 60% of the cases detected in Brazil), while minimizing the risks of the pandemic. And the risks are gigantic. Official statements - more or less required - that sufficient resources are available to deal with the tsunami are difficult to accept. New York has warned that in two or three weeks it can run out of essential medical materials and European health systems are being devastated by the avalanche of patients. Everything indicates, unfortunately, that something similar can happen in Latin America, from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, if the virus ends up behaving the same as it has done so far in other latitudes.
The huge amounts of money that Europe and the United States have injected to alleviate the economic consequences of the crisis are unthinkable in the region. The fragility of Latin American countries to respond to this frightful crisis, both in the health, social and economic fields, brings account of decades of neglect of institutions; of meager tax revenues; resistance of the oligarchies to pay more taxes and the collective inability of their rulers to build a State worthy of the name. State that these days and weeks your citizens will probably need, like never before in their history.
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