Peru: COVID State of Emergency

Taking a global lens to the COVID data I discovered that Peru has now eclipsed Belgium as the country with the highest level of COVID deaths per capita. I hadn’t heard about this on the national media — so I thought I would share here. Peru is currently in a state of emergency. International flights to Peru are closed. Curfews are in place.

Peru is now at about 966 fatalities per million of population. For context, the US is approximately 600 — which means that Peru has had 50% more fatalities per capita than the US. Peru has a population of 32 million.

You can also see this from the ‘Flu Ratio’ number. That level of deaths is close to 6x what we would expect a typical flu cycle to run (in the US). That’s a blunt instrument — but helps to put this in context.

We note from the data a couple of large upward revisions in the fatality numbers — which are those large spikes occuring in July and August. It looks like much of the upswing from early July was a result of relaxing of controls from earlier lock downs.

As of July 1st — Peru entered Phase 3 of economic recovery.

Source: pe.usembassy.gov (see curfew link below)

Thankfully the cases, and fatalities have started to trend down from their peaks in late August.

We send our thoughts and prayers to the people in Peru and hope for swift and effective leadership to bring COVID under control.

The situation across South America is similarly bad, with many of the South & Central America countries continuing to experience high levels of daily cases. Argentina is currently #1 in the globe with 250 new cases per million per day (7 day moving average).

Brazil has the 3rd highest number of COVID cases in the word at 4.4 million — and 133,000 deaths. While the US gets much media attention for 6.5 million cases and 190,000 deaths, the per capita picture is more important for global comparisons.

Expressed per capita — Brazil now has more deaths than the US. The US has a total of 596 fatalities per million of population, Brazil has 640. That’s still far short of the situation in Peru.