The coronavirus is disproportionately killing Colombia’s poor, who make up more than 60% of the fatalities registered by the country’s statistics agency DANE.
In a report, DANE said that 64.4% of the 70,848 deaths analyzed by the statistics agency were categorized as people from the lowest three social stratifications.
According to 2018 estimates, 49% of Colombia’s population belongs to these stratifications, indicating how poor and lower-class Colombians were disproportionately victimized by the pandemic.
Another 32.3% of the deaths were people from the middle class, a group that makes up an estimated 35% of the national population.
The 16% of people designated as upper class contributed only 3.4% of the coronavirus-related deaths registered until April 11.
The statistics agency was unable to determine the social class of 2.9% of analyzed COVID-19 fatalities.
COVID-19 deaths per social class
The DANE study only studied fatalities caused by COVID-19 and did not include the social impact of the coronavirus and the economic crisis it caused.
A previous study by DANE showed that the crisis surged unemployment and underemployment while other studies showed that the country’s poverty rate skyrocketed throughout 2020.
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Regional differences
The study also revealed how the pandemic generated a much higher mortality rate in the Andean region while killing less people per 100,000 inhabitants in the tropical Caribbean region.
The virus additionally seemed to have more difficulty spreading in remote and underdeveloped areas where locals’ mobility is limited.
The exception to this apparent rule was the southern Amazonas province, which was hit by a an almost uncontrollable wave at the beginning of the pandemic when health authorities were still being equipped.
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The reliability of this fatality rate is limited as health authorities’ testing capacity in remote regions was severely limited by complications in mobility.
COVID-19 mortality rate per province