Colombia seems to suffer a COVID-19 fatigue while the pandemic has not even reached one third of its projected intensity. The pandemic’s strategy has changed.
The misfortune of the South American country is being last in the contagion line. Fatigue kicked in months before the worst has been projected.
The coronavirus seems to have changed strategy, from taking Europe by surprise in a blitzkrieg to submitting a relatively prepared Colombia to a lengthy siege.
Defeating the defenses
The 167 COVID-19 fatalities confirmed on Sunday exceed the deaths registered in the entire month of March after the first person died of the pandemic on the 20th of that month, but the score bars on news websites have all but disappeared.
The 3,000 total deaths registered in Colombia are nothing compared to the 35,000 deaths in Italy so far, yet the South American country is projected to overtake the European country’s death toll within months.
The pandemic is demonstrating that it can and will defeat any defense without mercy.
Exhausting Colombia
Despite three months of stay at home orders, Colombia’s healthcare system has begun collapsing and between 40% to 60% of health workers are reporting burnout symptoms.
Resilient but naive, Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez believes she can still enforce a quarantine.
President Ivan Duque, weak but realistic, surrendered weeks ago already and no longer seeks to “flatten the curve.”
Both Duque and Lopez hope people’s personal responsibility will “extend the curve” while they wait for a vaccine.
No head shot, but torture
The coronavirus is not going to give Colombia a so-called “tiro de gracia,” or merciful bullet to the head, but it will torture the country to death.
COVID-19 will seek out the most vulnerable — those for who working from home is not an option or those who have a social life — and kill them.
By the time it’s done — and no virus is done until there is a vaccine — COVID-19 will have killed more people in Colombia than 50 years of war and drug trafficking combined.
The latest coronavirus will leave the South American country exhausted, starving, traumatized, without an economy to speak of, but with multiple armed conflicts.