While the city of Guayaquil, located in the pacific coast of Ecuador, registers only 49.8% of the infected in the official figures of Covid-19 of the whole country, and the Guayas province, whose capital is precisely Guayaquil, accumulates 70% of the total cases, the government of President Lenín Moreno announced that they will put into practice a plan to make the confinement measures more flexible as from May 4, with the argument that the number of emergency consultations has been reduced. They will do so progressively.
Ecuador is the third country with the most cases in Latin America. As of April 29, the authorities reported 24258 cases and 871 deaths.
The rapid spread of the virus in Guayaquil made the bodies of people who developed Covid-19 accumulated inside the homes for days, with no one to collect them. Families had to wrap them up and carry them out to the sidewalks because of the smell, waiting for them to be taken away.
John Otis did a piece for the U.S. public radio NPR in which he highlights that the president of Ecuador himself, Lenín Moreno, recognized that the real figures of the coronavirus infection in the country are higher than the official ones.
“In both the number of infections and deaths, the official records fall short. The reality always exceeds the number of tests and the speed with which attention is paid,” Moreno said in early April, when images of bodies on the streets of Guayaquil were published in many media outlets around the world.
Ecuador has been in a state of emergency since March 16, with curfews, the closing of schools and the suspension of non-essential work activities. The circulation of of public transportation is also restricted (taxis can only circulate by license plate number).
Starting next Monday, the government will rehearse phases to increasingly deactivate these measures, in a plan they informaly call “traffic lights”.
CNN en Español reported, following President Moreno’s recent explanation on a national appearance, that the activation of this plan will follow “health and biosecurity protocols.”
During the color red stage, the first one, the current restrictions will be maintained throughout the country, only with an extension of home delivery schedules.
In the yellow stage, working hours will be resumed with half of the staff; commercial premises will be opened to let in only 30% of customers, and urban transport will be able to circulate with 30% of passengers. The curfew would be reduced.
Even when the green light comes on, there will not be 100% occupancy and activity. The maximum number of staff that will be able to go to work will be 70%, and shops and public transport will be able to operate with 50% of their capacity. The curfew will be more flexible.
According to CNN en Español, Moreno said that the implementation of this plan “does not mean that the emergency is over” and that it will be the mayors of each city “who will have the last word.”
Indeed, El Comercio reported that Guayaquil is not even ready to go through the red light phase. Vice Mayor Josué Sánchez said, quoted in this April 27 report: “We have seen the difficulty that has existed in controlling the quarantine. How do you think people will react when they are told they can go out, with social distancing? We don’t support this.” The city’s mayor, Cynthia Viteri, said she would review the experts’ recommendations she has requested before making any decisions. “We will make the best decisions for the well-being of the citizens, based on technical and professional criteria,” she posted on her Twitter account. The message was published with an attached letter from the Guayas Medical Association, in which they show “their deep concern” about the “hasty decisions the government intends to make.”
As a matter of fact, the vice president of this association, Javier Carrillo, said in the El Comercio report that nothing should change in the next two weeks. “We haven’t even controlled the first plateau [of the pandemia].”
According to the article, Vice Mayor Sanchez confirmed that new cases of Covid-19 are still appearing in the city. Out of 2,500 health care visits per week, he says, 30% have “mild, moderate or severe symptoms of covid-19.”
President Moreno said in his speech, as cited by CNN en Español, that if there is a new outbreak of the virus, the measures will return to point zero of the restriction, as they are now.
Guayaquil has been called the “Wuhan of Latin America”, because it is the first and strongest source of infection in Ecuador. The experts’ explanation is that in February, which is a month of vacation and high temperatures in the city, many people gathered at public outdoor events without knowing they were infected; in the process, groups of people traveled to Spain and Italy, where many Ecuadorian immigrants live, and from there they returned to Guayaquil with the virus in their bodies. This is what Patrick J. McDonnell and Pablo Jaramillo Viteri report for the Los Angeles Times, based on interviews with experts.
“Guayaquil became a bomb for distributing the virus,” Marcelo Aguilar, an epidemiologist from that country, told them. In fact, the first Covid-19 death was recorded on 13 March, a 71-year-old woman who had just returned from Spain.
In the city, moreover, there are a large number of people who live in the slums, adds NPR’s John Otis. These people are day laborers; their livelihoods depend on informal work on the streets, so they haven’t been able to attend the confinement. They have been forced to go out to work to put some food on the table.
The bodies are no longer on the sidewalks of Guayaquil, but there are still families who cannot find their own, as Matias Zibell reported for BBC Mundo. Zibell writes, alluding to the government’s confirmation, that during the first half of April, 5700 more people than the country’s average died in Guayas, where Guayaquil is located.
“Dozens of people are claiming the bodies of their relatives in hospitals, the judicial police, the morgues; they are doing it in person, through social networks or through unsuccessful calls to 911,” the journalist describes.
One of these people is Rebeca Núñez, who has not yet been able to bury her grandmother, because she cannot find her. “They told us they were going to take her to a morgue, but I’ve been calling 911 and they tell me they don’t have any records. They told us to go to legal medicine, but we are in quarantine and we can’t just walk out. We checked the Coronavirus Ecuador website and my grandmother doesn’t show up,” she told Zibell.