translated from Spanish: In Nicaragua, sporting events are held as if nothing, despite a global health emergency

Nicaragua.- Sports tournaments do not stop in Nicaragua: one day there are professional football matches, another day you play baseball, you run a cycling race or you have a boxing fight, as if there was no pandemic of the new coronavirus.
Athletes are convinced that Nicaragua has a pandemic “under control”, with less than a dozen cases reported by the authorities; others for the love of sport or for fear of losing their contracts for leaving work.
I think one is in danger of the circumstances that are going on all over the world”, but “there is an employment contract that has to be respected”, says the footballer of the club Las Sabanas of first division, José Martínez, at the conclusion of a duel in Managua.
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega said last Wednesday, on his first public appearance after a month’s absence, that the progress of the pandemic in the country is “slow” and refused to declare quarantine, close borders or demand social estrangement as the rest of the world does.
And the sport hasn’t stopped either. Two cycling rallies were held this week and boxing fights return over the weekend, which takes place in open fields, parks or spacious gyms to try to avoid contagion.
The national baseball championship, Nicaraguans’ favourite sport, will also be revived after the Nicaraguan Higher Baseball Commission threatened to sanction anyone who refuses to play for fear of the virus.
The controversy also reaches the football league, the only one that remains active in Latin America in the midst of the pandemic, after the Nicaraguan Football Federation (Fenifut) approved to continue the games due to the absence of official restrictions.
Original source: Excélsior

Original source in Spanish