Now this is curious, is it not?
From NPR:
Haiti has one of the lowest death rates from COVID-19 in the world.
As of the end of April, only 254 deaths were attributed to COVID-19 in Haiti over the course of the entire pandemic. The Caribbean nation, which often struggles with infectious diseases, has a COVID-19 death rate of just 22 per million. In the U.S. the COVID-19 death rate is 1,800 per million, and in parts of Europe. the fatality rate is approaching 3,000 deaths per million.
Haiti's success is not due to some innovative intervention against the virus. Most people have given up wearing masks in public. Buses and markets are crowded. And Haiti hasn't yet administered a single COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Bill Pape is basically Haiti's Dr. Fauci (in the role he plays for the country; I do not mean to imply that he's a camera-hugging narcissist) and he was leading "a national commission in Haiti to deal with COVID-19."
I say WAS leading not because he got fired, but because they dissolved the commission earlier this year.
Why?
"The reason mainly is because we have very, very few cases of COVID," Pape says. The local health agency Pape heads, known as GHESKIO, actually shuttered its COVID-19 units last fall due to a lack of patients.
So what the stinkin heck is going on?
It's not lack of testing, as NPR notes. And Haiti did get hit with a first wave that "filled hospital wards."
But no second wave. And only 250 total deaths.
Pape says the country has pretty much gone back to the way life was pre-pandemic. Schools are open. Thousands of people packed the northern coastal Port-de-Paix for Carnival in February.
"Most people don't wear a mask," he says.
Not only have outdoor markets reopened; they were never completely closed.
Sheltering in place and working from home are luxuries most Haitians can't afford. As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haitians on average earn less than $2,000 per year according to the U.N. And most, Pape says, have gone back to work.
"Because if they don't work, they don't eat, their family doesn't eat," he says.
Concern about the pandemic is so minimal that this April, when the World Health Organization-led COVAX program offered Haiti a shipment of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, the government rejected it.
How do you explain this, in a dirt-poor country with terrible health care and people stacked on top of each other?
Is it because the average age in Haiti is just 23?
Is it because most homes are open-air?
Is it because quality of life is already so low (and deaths so common) that the first wave was just seen as nbd and so the people just absorbed it and built up herd immunity?
The heck is going on here?
