Coronavirus: Haiti Still Avoiding a Major Outbreak

There are certain countries that I thought would be overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases and deaths. One of those countries was Haiti, which at this point in time, I was wrong. I'm not the only person who thought that would occur, of course.

I last checked in on Haiti back in October. I figured it would be time to take another look. The Miami Herald (Dec 16) investigates this situation:

“Sincerely, I don’t have an explanation as to why,” [Dr. Sophia Cherestal Wooley, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in Port-au-Prince] said. “We cannot say that the virus isn’t in circulation and I don’t think Haiti has a different virus that’s circulating . . . ”

. . . This week, health workers on the front lines of the pandemic were warned that the country may be heading into a second wave. Not only is the country experiencing an uptick in laboratory confirmed cases, but the positivity rate has gone from almost 9 percent in November to almost 16 percent last week. The majority of the cases are coming mostly from the United States, particularly Florida, and the Dominican Republic.

. . . Even anecdotally, the country isn’t seeing the kind of death toll it saw just 10 years ago when cholera hit, and medical professionals were overwhelmed with corpses and deathly ill patients..

The article mentions that a range of 2,000 to 20,000 deaths was estimated for the country. I took a look at Worldometer and the Dominican Republic with a similar population already has over 2,000 deaths while Haiti is 10% of that figure.

Are they in the clear? Well, as mentioned in the above quote, there is a hint of a second wave. In many countries, the second wave was far worse than the first. Some of this might be due to a lack of testing, which understated the first wave. Still in pure daily verified cases, we can see that the second wave was much worse in countries from the United States to Canada to Sweden. So if that holds for Haiti, we could see daily cases eventually get into the thousands (as long as they have the testing capacity). 

It is interesting that current cases are from people coming in from the United States and the Dominican Republic. Will those individuals start to seed cases within the Haitian population? I'll check in on that at a later point in time.