Latin America’s health systems brace for a battering

A PROCESSION OF disappointments awaits residents of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, when illness strikes. Those who report symptoms of covid-19 to the health-care hotline get appointments scheduled for several weeks later, by which time they will probably have recovered or died. With ambulance services overwhelmed, stricken people arrive at hospitals in pickup trucks, only to find there are no empty beds. When somebody dies at home, the corpse joins a long waiting list for removal. The city has run out of wooden coffins. Some relatives dump loved ones’ bodies in the sweltering streets.

Guayaquil is the first place in Ecuador where covid-19 has struck with force. That is probably because the country’s Pacific coast takes a long school holiday starting in early February, five months before the Andean region, including Quito, the capital. Guayaquileños flew to and from Europe after the novel coronavirus began spreading but before cancelling trips became the norm. The hospitals and bureaucracy could not cope with the disease they brought back. In desperation the city’s mayor, Cynthia Viteri, told municipal vehicles to park on runways to block incoming flights. She contracted the virus.

Other parts of Latin America wonder whether Guayaquil’s horrors will soon be theirs. “No health system in the...

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