The COVID disaster in South America

This is incredibly dire:

Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.

Figuring out the last mile of overcoming vaccine resistance in the U.S. is going to be a problem (Joe Rogan walked back his anti-vaxx comments, at least), but getting vaccines as quickly as possible to the rest of the world will be an even bigger one.

Of course, the fact that the country with half of the region’s population is being governed by an authoritarian who makes Trump look competent and responsible by comparison is making things much worse:

The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.

But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.

What makes this so tragic is that we know how to suppress the virus; most of the world has just given up.