Venezuela joins Brazil in shady Covid-19 data practices

Since South America was declared the world’s new Covid-19 epicenter by the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 22, with more than half a million confirmed coronavirus cases, things have only gotten worse. The situation has reached such a point that the Brazilian government has begun masking its official coronavirus numbers — no longer divulging total figures of deaths and cases, and disclosing contradictory data on daily deaths. As a result, Brazil was momentarily removed from Johns Hopkins University’s Covid-19 map, due to a lack of reliable figures. Despite revering the U.S. and coveting membership to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this haphazard and unscientific approach to statistics means Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil is now more reminiscent of its much-maligned neighbor to the north, Venezuela.

The desperate Covid-19 situations in Brazil and Ecuador have meant Venezuela’s long-term economic and social crisis has been buried in international headlines. However, if Caracas already had problems before the pandemic, its insolvent situation has become a mitigating factor in its own fight against the coronavirus. 

At the midpoint of 2020, with the first Covid-19 case in Latin America three months old, President Nicolás Maduro’s government...