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Peru revises pandemic death toll, now worst in the world per capita

Attendees gather during a campaign rally with Pedro Castillo, presidential candidate for the Peru Libre party, in Lima, Peru, on Thursday, May 27, 2021. Peru's sovereign bonds dropped after the candidate feared by investors, Pedro Castillo, extended his lead over Keiko Fujimori ahead of the country's presidential runoff on June 6. Photographer: Miguel Yovera/Bloomberg via Getty Images

LIMA, May 31 (Reuters) - Peru on Monday almost tripled its official COVID-19 death toll to 180,764, following a government review, making it the country with the worst death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

By Marcelo Rochabrun and Marco Aquino

Peru has been among the hardest hit Latin America countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its hospitals overcrowded with patients and demand for oxygen outstripping availability. Experts had long warned that the true death toll was being undercounted in official statistics.

The government said it will now update its death count, which stood at 69,342 as of Sunday, in part because of a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause.

According to Johns Hopkins data https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, Hungary had the worst number of per capita COVID-19 deaths at about 300 per 100,000 people. With its updated death toll, Peru now stands at more than 500 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people.

“We think it is our duty to make public this updated information,” said Peru Prime Minister Violeta Bermudez during a news conference announcing the result of the review.

In Latin America, Brazil has the highest total death toll with more than 450,000 lives lost due to the pandemic. Based on population, however, Peru’s per capita death toll now more than doubles that of Brazil, according to the data.

Peru’s updated numbers are in line with so-called excess death figures, which researchers have used in Peru and other countries to measure possible undercounting during the pandemic.

Excess deaths measures the total number of deaths over a period of time and compares it with the same period pre-pandemic.

 

(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun and Marco Aquino; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Bill Berkrot)

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  • Brian Cotter says:

    Peru are to be respected for the updated reporting. RSA not reporting even a portion of excess deaths as Covid and reporting of cases and deaths per 100,000 or 1 million population. Using this reporting per Province it levels the playing field instead of just saying Gauteng has most cases, obviously because of high population.

  • Sydney Kaye says:

    They are using the Chinese vaccine. Chile had the same problem because it doesn’t appear to work. A lot of the countries we were unfavorably compared with on vaccine rollout were using the unproven Chinese vaccines.

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