MONTEVIDEO | More than 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been officially recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic in December 2019, according to a count carried out by AFP on Tuesday at 5 p.m. from reports provided by the authorities health.
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The 34 countries in the region account for 601,256 deaths (for 19,057,391 reported cases), behind Europe (747,887) and ahead of the United States and Canada (464,204) and Asia (241,391).
After a slight lull in the fall, the subcontinent experienced an acceleration in contaminations and deaths in December. The daily death toll in the region has stabilized since January 20 above 3,000 per day on average, twice as high as in mid-November.
On October 31, Latin America and the Caribbean recorded more than 400,000 deaths in total. December 29, 500,000. While 59 days had passed between these two dates, it took only 35 days since the end of December to identify 100,000 more deaths and reach the threshold of 600,000 victims.
The region is the second continent to reach this threshold, after Europe, which crossed it a month ago, on January 7.
Brazil and Mexico concentrate more than half of the deaths in the region. The second most bereaved country in the world after the United States, Brazil has 226,309 deaths for nearly 9.3 million cases. As for Mexico, it deplores 159,100 for nearly 1.9 million identified infections.
Reported to the population, the country most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is Peru, with 125 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Mexico (123) and Panama (123), then Argentina (107) and Colombia (107).
Globally, COVID-19 has caused more than 103 million infections and 2.2 million deaths since the start of the epidemic in December 2019.