Lima.- Peru seeks to clarify whether a group of 27,253 deaths can join the figure of 19,021 confirmed victims until Thursday who died from COVID-19, Salud.La Minister Pilar Mazzetti reported to the press that the people in that group have COVID-19 recorded as one of the causes of death, but were not tested serologically or molecularly to determine exactly whether they had the virus or not.
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The other 19,021 victims were tested, so their deaths meet the international definition requiring “a clinical case with a test,” the minister said.
Only then can I compare myself to the rest of the world.”
Tests for COVID-19, purchased abroad, were scarce in the early months of the pandemic in Peru. The first confirmed death in the country occurred on 19 March. The count of coronavirus deaths has caused more than one headache to the government of President Martín Vizcarra. The opposition claims that the actual figures of the deceased are hidden, but the representative says their management is “transparent”. Vizcarra stated last week that at first the pandemic was “so abrupt that it created chaos” and caused inaccuracies in the death count. Last week, after several months of questioning, Peru admitted under-recording its casualties and added nearly 4,000 deaths to the official number of coronavirus deaths. Mazzetti indicated that a local commission and the Pan American Health Organization were reviewing the suspected cases. Peru has been hit hard by the virus even though it was the first to impose a quarantine in Latin America to curb contagion. Anyway, the public health service is almost overwhelmed. The country will suffer the third worst recession in the world in 2020 and a 12-point decline in its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.Peru is the nation of the Americas with the highest number of deaths per million, above Chile, the United States, Brazil and Mexico. In Latin America Peru is the third country with the most dead and infected, below Brazil and Mexico.You may also be interested:
