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With Deaths Surging, Ecuador Now Sees Toll Far Beyond Estimates
Stephan Kueffner, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- With government crews gathering up 150 corpses daily in southern Ecuador, President Lenin Moreno announced on Thursday that the death toll of coronavirus would soar far beyond anything official data so far has suggested.
Guayas province, which counts the sweltering port city of Guayaquil as its capital, has been the epicenter of the outbreak in Ecuador with more than 70% of the cases. The government’s emergency task force has seen fatalities rise five-fold in a week, Moreno said.
“We think there will be between 2,500 and 3,500 people who will die from COVID in these months in Guayas alone,” he said in a nationwide speech, pledging to continue to report the unvarnished truth. “Today we certainly have tens of thousands of contagions and hundreds of lives cut short by this virus.”
The president’s comments made clear that the official count is wildly off base since the last report showed Ecuador with 120 dead and 3,163 confirmed cases. Even those underreported figures show the small Latin American country of 17.5 million people trails only Brazil -- population 210 million -- in fatalities from the pandemic.
More:
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/with-deaths-surging-ecuador-now-sees-toll-far-beyond-estimates-1.1416643
