At the end of March, Latin America had registered 537 deaths caused by Covid-19, with over 20,000 confirmed cases. Only two countries in the region have yet to see a single death from the disease: El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele is in an all-out war against the virus, and Haiti, where only 16 cases have been confirmed and testing levels are desperately low.
As The Brazilian Report explained last week, low rates of testing per capita per inhabitant mean underreporting of coronavirus cases, especially in Latin America. And the situation could be even more severe in Haiti, which according to the World Bank is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Haiti has one of the world’s lowest Human Development Indexes, ranking 168th out of 189 countries. The World Bank also estimates that over 60 percent of the country lives below the poverty line, receiving less than USD 3 per day. With the country in a perpetual financial crisis, the health system is in a nosedive.
In 2010, amid a social crisis that made the UN send a military mission led by Brazil, Haiti was hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake, followed by aftershocks of magnitudes 5.9 and 5.5. The episode killed more than 200,000 people, injured 300,000 and left at...
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