Latin America Becomes a New COVID Epicenter

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: People are really hurting. What’s the way out for these countries in Latin America?

JULIO FRENK, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI: You know, I think we need to switch that set forth dilemma, although I would also choose life. But the dilemma, it’s false. We need to pursue simultaneously the goal of protecting the people’s health and reactivating the economy. Because, you know, if you extend the lockdown beyond what’s necessary, you will actually not just hurt the economy, you hurt the health of people. People who can’t eat, who lose their jobs, who are — plus, the physical and mental health burden of being — staying at home. If, on the other hand, you open the economy in a responsible manner, not only will you hurt people’s health, you will probably face a future lockdown that will further harm the economy. So, the two objectives need to be hand in hand. And the key to achieving both is to be able to carry out enough testing so that we can actually move from this extreme measure of what I would call mitigation, which is the lockdown, to the more traditional public health response, which is where you test people, you identify cases, you trace their contacts, and those are the people you quarantine. The problem in Latin America and even the world with this pandemic is that faced with a highly contagious disease, there was a huge delay in instituting which level of testing. And then you have countries like Mexico that explicitly decided not to do testing, in a baffling way, contradicting all the expert opinion. And because it’s an exponential growth, even a delay of one, two, three weeks translates into thousands of cases. And by the time those countries were reacting, it was too late. I mean, the transmission was so entrenched in communities that you couldn’t go to the traditional public health response of only quarantining people who are positive under context. So, the solution for both things is testing and then it’s enforcing some of the personal protection measures, like wearing face masks. But again, this requires from the politicians clear, clear communication that — what it takes to be safely back in the economy.

AMANPOUR: Right.

FRENK: We’ve seen not just a failure of leadership in some of these policies, but also an incredibly confusing communication that leaves people with no clear idea on what they would do.