View From the South

At Outside the Beltway Steven Taylor points out the increasing impact that COVID-19 is having on the countries of Central and South America:

If we look at the Worldometers stats and sort by cases per 1 million, French Guiana is #2, Chile #5, Panama #6, Peru, #8, Brazil #10, Aruba #14, Colombia #20, Turks and Caicos #22, and Bolivia #24 (half of the top ten, and nine out of the top 25).

In raw numbers, Brazil is #2 in the world in cases behind the USA as well as #2 in deaths, again behind the USA (which ought to be tired of all the wining, I have to add), with Mexico in third place.

In terms of death per million residents, Peru is third on the list and Chile ninth. With Brazil (11), Mexico (12), Panama (14), Sint Maarten (15), Bolivia (16), Ecuador (19), Colombia (20) occupying space in the top 25. (The US is 10th by this metric).

Despite the toll that COVID-19 has taken on the U. S. at this point it has not overwhelmed our health care system but the same may not be true of the countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean. They don’t have our capacity or our deep pockets. They are going to need assistance and lots of it.

I have been warning about this since the earliest days of the pandemic. With our highly porous border control the disease has unquestionably spread from the U. S. to Mexico but for the same reasons it is unlikely to remain that way forever. The U. S.’s outbreak and in particular our policy responses to it are a triple whammy for our neighbors in this hemisphere. Not only have we spread SARS-CoV-2 to them, putting our economy into a tailspin or, at the best, into a dormant state has reduced remittances to people living in those neighbors and rendered the U. S. a poor safety valve for people there who are out of work or just afraid.

South America is only now entering its winter and, if you recall, the worst days of the pandemic here were in the late winter and early spring. I see little reason that will not be the case to the south of us as well.

Even were a vaccine to become available or even if we were to achieve “herd immunity” here, to escape the pandemic we will need to take the outbreaks in the countries of South and Central America as seriously as we do our own at least.

I fear that’s politically untenable, for different reasons on different sides of the aisle. What we’ll be left with is a vicious cycle of our infecting them which circles around to infect us which circles around to infect them again and so on and so on.