Coronavirus: Low Numbers Infected, Don't Believe It

Why are there so few cases in Africa? That's a misleading question as I'm not going to discuss Africa, but I did run across two articles in the Los Angeles Times that looks in discrepancies between what one might find in various trackers and what actually might be happening on the ground.

This LA Times looks into Ecuador. I'm writing this article on Thursday, April 2nd. At the time, Worldometer had the number of cases in Ecuador at 3,163 and the total deaths at 120. The article specifically looks at the port city of Guayaquil, which has a population of 2.8 million.



Over the last few days, several were wrapped in plastic and left on the streets. Others have lain unclaimed in hospitals and clinics that have been overwhelmed by infections. The city morgue is full.

The majority of the dead are believed to be victims of the virus, but nobody can say for sure how many. There has been little testing.

The country has confirmed 2,700 infections and 93 deaths — 60 of them in Guayaquil and its immediate surroundings. But municipal officials there said they have recovered at least 400 bodies in recent days.

This article was written on April 1st which is a reason why there are some differences in the numbers as well as the fact that the LA Times might be using a different data source. Now one shouldn't conclude that those 400 individuals died because of COVID-19. The problem with the article is that no context is provided in terms of how many dead bodies are found in the streets on a daily basis. On the other hand, if this is a weekly number, that would result in 20,800 dead bodies being found annual in a city of 2.8 million. That doesn't seem normal.

Yet, for those who live in Los Angeles and are concerned that the virus might hit the homeless population, this quote should draw concern:

The majority of those whose bodies have been found on the street were probably indigent, said Hector Galarza, a publicist in Guayaquil. “But it is generating panic.”

There is also this that is proof that it doesn't matter where you live, there are always those who don't take this virus seriously and then pay for it later:

She died two weeks later, by which time President Lenin Moreno had placed strict restrictions on international and domestic travel. Ecuador’s borders were sealed on March 16.

But residents of Guayaquil, a bustling port city filled with open markets, were slow to take seriously restrictions imposed by the national and local governments. 

Another Los Angeles Times article looks into the potential divide between testing that is going on between rich and poor neighborhoods. It mentions how wealthy neighborhoods like Bel-Air and Brentwood have high number of cases while poor neighborhoods like El Monte and Watts have fewer cases:

But those disparities do not mean the virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading more widely through rich neighborhoods than in poorer ones, public health officials and experts say. Rather, they are probably skewed by uneven access to testing and, in some instances, by wealthy residents who traveled internationally and had some of the earliest confirmed infections.

There is also one fact in the article that stands out. Only 21,000 people have been tested in Los Angeles county. Yet we know that 51,809 (at the time I wrote this) have this virus in New York City. I've read articles about how California and Washington are doing so much better at controlling the virus than New York. Yet when you read how Los Angeles county has done fewer tests than the number of cases in New York City, it makes you question if Los Angeles county is really doing that great of a job.