Covid-19: Brazil has the second highest incidence of deaths in Latin America

Brazil has the second highest incidence of coronavirus deaths in Latin America. There are 110.43 deaths per million inhabitants. Ecuador alone is worse off, with 181.54 deaths for the same portion of the population. The situation in the country made headlines when the body collection system in Guayaquil collapsed. The figures are from OurWorldInData, a research project at the University of Oxford in England, which disseminates material from around the world on various subjects, including Covid-19. In this case, the site used information from John Hopkins University in the USA. They were analyzed by (M)Dados, the metropolis's data journalism center. Brazil had the first reported case of coronavirus in Latin America on February 26. The first death was reported in Argentina on March 8. Since then, 41,400 deaths and 764,300 contaminations have been recorded in the region. Last Friday (22/05), the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the site as the new epicenter of the disease in the world and Brazil as the state that most concerns. In absolute numbers, our country is the leader, with 374,900 cases and 23,500 deaths. The comparison between populations of different sizes is unfair, so the case metric is used per million inhabitants. It works as follows: suppose there are 10 diagnoses in a country and 2 million inhabitants. In this case, there are five confirmed infected per million inhabitants. When this calculation is made for all latin american countries, Chile is where the most contaminated per million inhabitants occur, with 3,780; followed by Peru, with 3,760 per million; and Panama, which has 2,591 per million. Brazil is fifth, with 1,763 cases per million inhabitants. The comparison between the different countries, even taking into account the population of each nation, leaves out another very important factor: the underreporting of cases. And in this regard, the numbers indicate that Brazil is champion. It is not possible, however, to calculate the lack of records in each State without detailed studies and, therefore, this factor was not taken into account in this report.