While there are big headlines around the world about the record COVID-19 death rates in the United States and Brazil, there's been little attention paid to three Latin American success stories in the fight against the virus: Paraguay, Costa Rica and Uruguay.
These countries have had some the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world, similar to those of New Zealand and South Korea.
Paraguay, with a population of 7 million, has had only 11 COVID-19 deaths. Costa Rica, with 5 million people, has had 10 deaths. Uruguay, with 3.4 nillion people, has had 22 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
Measured in relation to their populations, Paraguay's COVID-19 death rate is 0.16 per 100,000 people, Costa Rica's is 0.20 people per 100,000 people and Uruguay's is 0.64 people per 100,000 people. In other words, they have had less than one death per 100,000 residents.
By comparison, the U.S. COVID-19 fatality rate is 30 people per 100,000 people, the Johns Hopkins database shows. The United States has 150 times more coronavirus deaths per capita than Costa Rica.
Part of Paraguay's success could be that it is a landlocked country, which already had relatively few international flights before the pandemic. It canceled most international flights as soon as the pandemic started, which kept the virus pretty much outside its borders.
Costa Rica and Uruguay are more interesting cases. Asked why they did did so much better than the United States and Brazil, most experts agree that _ unlike President Donald Trump and Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro _ their presidents took the pandemic seriously and acted decisively early on.
Unlike Trump and Bolsonaro, who first downplayed the pandemic and lost precious time to buy ventilators and testing equipment, the leaders of Costa Rica and Uruguay acted immediately, leading by example by wearing face masks themselves most of the time when appearing in public.
Interestingly, neither Costa Rica nor Uruguay went into total lockdowns. Instead, they asked citizens to practice voluntary social isolation.
In Uruguay, President Luis Alberto Lacalle asked people to exercise "responsible freedom." Most Uruguayans acted on his request, and went into self-isolation for more a month and a half. Uruguay is now scheduled to re-open its schools starting June 1.
"Both Costa Rica and Uruguay started testing and tracing very early on," says Ferdinando Regalia, a leading Inter-American Development Bank public health expert. "Uruguay did very well developing its own COVID-19 diagnostic tests, while Costa Rica deployed a big net of 'sentinel' doctors to detect coronavirus cases."
The success of Paraguay, Costa Rica and Uruguay in fighting the pandemic seems to contradict the conventional wisdom that dictatorial regimes do better combating pandemics than democratic ones.
In fact, Paraguay, Costa Rica and Uruguay have had fewer COVID-19 deaths as a percentage of their populations than Cuba, the Johns Hopkins database shows. (I'm not including Venezuela and Nicaragua here, because most experts have questioned their official figures.)
All of this seems to back up a new Oxford University study showing democracies, in general, have done better than autocracies in corralling the pandemic.
"Despite autocracies introducing more stringent lockdowns and using more privacy-intrusive contact tracing, democracies have been more effective in meeting the policy objective of reducing geographic mobility," the study says.
Carl Benedikt Frey, the study's leading author, told me that he examined 111 countries' responses to the pandemic. He found that although autocracies imposed more restrictions on travel and people's movement, geographic mobility declined about 20% more sharply in democracies. "Good examples are South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand," he said.
We could add Paraguay, Costa Rica and Uruguay to that list. Leadership by example _ the fact these presidents wore masks in public, among other things _ and early actions have helped these countries keep their death rates at a minimum, with less draconian lockdowns than many other nations.
How sad that the leaders of other countries, including the United States, didn't emulate them. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.
