Latin America: A New Epicenter

Many countries are loosening their lockdown measures as governments become guardedly optimistic. 

If we believe the "official" numbers, coronavirus cases appear to be generally easing, if not contracting. 

And if we examine just the Top 7 countries with the highest tally of new cases on May 23 – we can calculate that together, they constituted 65.1% of the global total:

The positive outlook as described in the first two paras does not include Latin America. 

In fact, the World Health Organization had declared it “a new epicenter” of the coronavirus pandemic on Friday. It is noteworthy to mention that four of the seven countries are from Latin America itself.

Surges in infections across much of Central and South America continue to drive the global toll higher even as hard-hit nations in Europe, along with the United States, sought to move into a cautious “recovery” phase with new cases supposedly on a downward trend.

A graphic produced by Johns Hopkins researchers shows the number of new infections around the world 

Be informed that Latin America contributes 13.0% of total cases worldwide – and this is slightly less than half of the US share of 30.9%. Moreover, the Top 7 countries – identified below – already add up to 94.1% of Latin America's total number of cases:

Methinks, the Covid-19 situation in Latin America will only get worse.