COVID pandemic going from bad to worse in Latin America. That’s not good for U.S. trade or tourism | Opinion
The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts a worsening COVID-19 health crisis in Latin America. The pandemic is not likely to be under control in the region, several officials tell me, until the end of the year — or early 2022.
That would be several months after the pandemic might be defeated in the United States. President Biden announced this week that he has ordered an additional 200 million vaccines, which would finish the job of covering almost 300 million Americans eligible to be vaccinated by September.
Latin America’s lag in defeating the pandemic would not just bad news for the region, but also for the Biden administration and for U.S. cities such as Miami and New York, where many people depend heavily on Latin American tourism and trade with the region.
More than 20 million Latin American tourists visit the United States annually, and the $1.9 trillion in U.S. trade with the region in 2019 made it one of the top U.S. trading partners.
All of this should be one more urgent reason for Biden to step up his plans to reverse former President Trump’s idiotic policy of not joining the United Nations and WHO COVAX initiative to help developing countries get 2 billion COVID-19 vaccines by the end of this year. You can’t defeat the pandemic — or reduce its economic impact — if your neighbors get infected.
A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that if the United States and other wealthy nations are fully vaccinated by the middle of this year and developing countries are allowed to lag behind, the global economy could lose up to $9 trillion. About half of that total would be lost by the United States and other wealthy countries, it says.
Jarbas Barbosa, assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO’s regional branch, told me this week that Latin America’s coronavirus crisis could go from bad to worse in coming weeks.
Among the reasons he cited is the fact that it’s summertime in South America, and millions of people have traveled or failed to maintain social distance during the year-end holidays. In addition, there is “coronavirus fatigue” in much of the region, after almost a year of stringent on-and-off lockdowns in many countries.
And on top of everything else, the flow of vaccines to the region has been much slower than to the United States or Europe.
When I asked Barbosa when he estimates that the pandemic will be under control in Latin America, he said, “It would be a historic health conquest if we could do it by the end of this year.” My translation: It may not happen until sometime in 2022.
The global COVAX initiative is scheduled to start delivering 160 million COVID-19 vaccines worldwide in March. Most Latin American countries are among the 190 participating in the plan, but only about 10 in the region — the poorest ones — will qualify to get them for free.
Laurie Ann Ximenez-Fyvie, a Harvard-trained professor of medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University — who has just published the book “An Irreparable Damage,” about Mexico’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic — told me that “the future of the pandemic in Mexico looks very somber, because there’s not even a recognition by the government that things are bad.”
She said that predictions that countries such as Mexico and Brazil might conquer the pandemic by the end of the year may be too optimistic, because they don’t take into account that there are new — and more contagious — variants of the virus popping up in the region. “We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” she told me.
Fortunately, the Biden administration has said it will join the global COVAX vaccination plan, although details of how it will be done still are sketchy.
It is unlikely that the United States will ship vaccines to Latin American countries before all eligible Americans are vaccinated, but it could — like major European and Asian countries — help finance the distribution of vaccines to the poorest nations. That would not be just the right thing to do, it would also be in America’s best interest.
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