As Politicians Clashed, Bolivia’s Pandemic Death Rate Soared

Bolivia was mired in political turmoil when the pandemic hit. The response was chaotic. And the surge in deaths that followed was among the worst in the world, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

By By María Silvia Trigo, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Allison McCann of The NY Times. Excerpt:

"So many people were dying that the government’s numbers couldn’t be accurate.

Calls to pick up bodies were inundating Bolivia’s forensic office. By July, agents were gathering up to 150 bodies per day, 15 times the normal amount in previous years, said the country’s chief forensic official, Andrés Flores.

The demand on his office suggested that the official tally of Covid-19 deaths — now just over 4,300 — was a vast undercount, Mr. Flores said. But with limited testing, scarce resources, and a political crisis tearing the country apart, the extra lives lost were going largely unrecognized.

New mortality figures reviewed by The Times suggest that the real death toll during the outbreak is nearly five times the official tally, indicating Bolivia has suffered one of the world’s worst epidemics. The extraordinary rise in death, adjusted for its population, is more than twice as high as that of the United States, and far higher than the levels in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

About 20,000 more people have died since June than in past years, according to a Times analysis of registration data from Bolivia’s Civil Registry, a vast number in a country of only about 11 million people.

Tracking deaths from all causes gives a more accurate picture of the pandemic’s true toll, demographers say, because it does not depend on testing, which has been very limited in Bolivia. The mortality figures include people who may have died from Covid-19 and from other causes because they couldn’t get health care."