International health officials are warning that the Nicaraguan government’s perplexing weeks-long refusal to take measures to control the spread of COVID-19 is heightening the risk of an epidemic in Central America even as neighboring countries take tough action.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government urged Nicaraguans to party during Carnival celebrations, and it has said they should keep attending sports events and cultural festivals, and pack the country’s beaches during Holy Week vacations this week.
Doctors have been told not to alarm patients by wearing masks or using sanitizing gel.
Photo: AP
Before schools closed for an extended vacation on Friday last week, principals had threatened to expel students who missed class, and last month a third baseman was banned from professional baseball for three years after he asked to stop playing over virus fears.
Ortega’s administration has offered no detailed explanation for its refusal to take widely accepted measures, but the health minister has spoken of the need to support the economy, badly damaged by two years of anti-government protests and harsh crackdowns on dissent.
Some analysts say Ortega and his circle might fear that anti-virus measures would weaken their hold on power.
In the meantime, Nicaraguans are doing what they can to voluntarily stay away from one another, but Pan American Health Organization Director Carissa Etienne said that Nicaragua’s lack of official measures is increasing the risk of an epidemic.
“We have concerns for the lack of social distancing, the convening of mass gatherings. We have concerns about the testing, contact tracing, about the reporting of cases,” Etienne said on Tuesday.
Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado has warned that an out-of-control epidemic in Nicaragua would have consequences for all of Central America. In the middle of last month, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras closed their borders to foreigners and instituted social distancing measures.
There are also concerns about Ortega’s own health. The 74-year-old has not appeared in public for three weeks. Although he has been absent for long periods in the past only to reappear, his disappearance during a global pandemic is fueling rumors he might be ill, or personally terrified of the coronavirus.
“The broader problem in Nicaragua is that you have a dictatorship that is unable to take the pandemic seriously. It’s unable because they’re distracted by the health itself of its president,” said Manuel Orozco, a Nicaragua expert at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.
The country’s economic crisis — and resulting lack of revenue — also means the state’s ability to act is very limited, he said.
As a guerrilla commander, Ortega in 1979 helped overthrow then-Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza and was part of the Sandinista junta that took power and began to take the nation down a path toward communism.
He was first elected president in 1984, then lost re-election in 1990, but he has held the presidency since 2006 and implemented increasingly autocratic rule. His wife, Rosario Murillo, has served as the government’s principal spokeswoman and, since 2016, as Nicaraguan vice president.
Ortega’s violent crackdown on protests, which began in 2018, caused more than 328 deaths, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said. The political tension has had devastating effects on the country’s economy, especially in what had been a burgeoning tourism sector.
The government says that the country has only three confirmed cases of the virus, all imported, even as its borders remain open and infections steadily increase in neighboring countries.
Costa Rica has more than 400 confirmed infections, Honduras has more than 300 and El Salvador about 100. The Cuban Ministry of Public Health has said that two people arrived sick from Nicaragua and a third person tested positive this week after returning from Nicaragua.
“Nothing indicates that the problem that Spain, Italy and the United States have won’t repeat itself in Nicaragua, too,” epidemiologist Leonel Arguello said.
While the virus initially emerged in China during the winter and there is some suggestion that it might not spread as easily when both the temperature and humidity increase, scientists have said there is no good evidence yet that such weather — common in Central America — will significantly help tamp down the outbreak on its own.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS