As wave of ‘pneumonia’ deaths spreads, Nicaragua keeps silent on the coronavirus
Genaro Alberto Mendoza, a former Central American softball star in the 1970s and ‘80s, was taken to the hospital last week with a sore throat in the Nicaraguan city of Chinandega.
His family never saw him again.
Every time a family member went to the hospital the staff would not allow them to enter the room where the 74-year-old man was held. They said he was improving but that it was better to wait at home. On Monday, however, the hospital told the family that Mendoza had died and they had three hours to show up with a casket for him to be buried in immediately, without the chance of holding a viewing. Otherwise, local officials would have him buried at an undisclosed location.
What happened to Mendoza, who was buried by the family on Monday afternoon, has become a common occurrence in Chinandega, which has seen a large wave of “atypical pneumonia” deaths that the government refuses to admit were caused by the coronavirus.
Activists and medical personnel in the area claim that the Nicaraguan city has suffered at least 70 deaths due to the COVID-19 virus, but that hospital officials have been ordered to classify them as respiratory disease or heart problems, or any other illness, but not coronavirus.
“It is hard to believe the number of people that are dying, that according to [the government] was the result of a heart attack or of atypical pneumonia, anything except COVID,” said Kenia Gutiérrez, General Secretary of the grassroots Campesino Movement, who has been closely following the health crisis in Chinandega.
According to Gutierrez and other activists in Nicaragua, the Daniel Ortega administration reaction in the face of the pandemic has been to deny that it exists.
As of Tuesday, the government said Nicaragua has 25 confirmed cases and eight deaths related to the virus, way lower than its Central American neighbors, whose numbers are in the hundreds.
The official numbers, however, were questioned on Monday by the non-profit Observatorio Ciudadano, which reported having detected 1,033 coronavirus suspicious cases and the unusually high number of 188 deaths attributed recently to pneumonia.
Five former Nicaraguan health ministers also expressed their concerns over the weekend in a letter to the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization in which they claimed that “Nicaraguan citizens are at extreme risk” given that the Ortega administration has done almost nothing to prevent the spread of the virus.
“We are writing to you, concerned about what is happening in our country, due to the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic and its imminent worsening due to the lack of government action,” said the letter signed by former ministers Lea Guido, Dora María Téllez, Lombardo Martínez, Martha McCoy and Margarita Gurdián.
The lack of “preventive and containment actions,” in addition to the government’s insistence on carrying out public activities with large numbers of people, are creating a situation of great risk, the former ministers added in the letter addressed to WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus, and PAHO Director Carissa F. Etienne.
PAHO, which has been monitoring the health crisis throughout Latin America, has been warning that the Ortega government has done next to nothing to confront the pandemic while insisting that fears about the disease are exaggerated.
Chinandega, in western Nicaragua, seems to be the hardest-hit region, with its main hospital filled with patients suffering from respiratory problems.
Once a patient dies, hospital officials “hand over the bodies in fully-sealed coffins and prohibit family members from viewing them or opening the coffin, and you have to go in a short amount of time to get the body of your loved one, usually within two or three hours, for them to be buried immediately,” Gutiérrez said.
A doctor from the area who spoke to el Nuevo Herald on condition of anonymity, said that he estimates that about 50 patients are currently hospitalized at the city’s main hospital with coronavirus symptoms, but said they have not been tested and are not likely to be.
Many other patients with coronavirus-like symptoms have been sent home without being tested and without any kind of recommendations on how to avoid spreading the virus.
“They are being sent home without any type of focus controls and these people are having contact with their inner circle,” he said, adding that he personally has seen more than 20 people die from the disease.. “In other countries, relatives of positive patients are being tested. Not here. Here people die without knowing if they were sick or not.“
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
