El Salvador Perspectives

Regular readers of El Salvador Perspectives will remember that there have been strong reasons to doubt the official statistics of death from COVID-19 in El Salvador.  As I described in January, although the official death count in El Salvador from the COVID-19 pandemic was 4299 as of December 31, researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington estimated  that the actual number of pandemic-related deaths since March 2020 may have reached almost 26,000.  The official numbers thus represent a gross under-reporting which serves the government's version of how well it has managed the pandemic. Now an investigative report from La Prensa Grafica has revealed that the government's own internal statistics documented a much higher rate of COVID-19 deaths than it acknowledged to the Salvadoran public.  While the IHME numbers were based on statistical models of mortality rates and the progression of the pandemic, these...

As El Salvador enters 2023, it is at the end of what has been labelled its 6th wave of COVID-19 cases.  This was a surge of cases which began in October/November 2022 primarily due to the impact of Omicron subvariants.     According to the Ministry of Health there were only 10 patients in the Hospital El Salvador for treatment of COVID-19  as of January 9 , and only 8 persons tested positive  that day for the virus across the country compared to as many as 350 daily cases at the end of November. When the 2023 school year starts on February 6, the last pandemic measures will ease.  While the entire 2022 school year was hybrid with a mixture of in-person and remote learning, public schools in 2023 will finally return to all in-person classes. President Bukele who was the country's lead communicator on the pandemic in 2020 has moved on and never mentions the pandemic these days.  The last presidential  tweet  using the word "Covid" was in D...

As we reach the second anniversary of the pandemic impact of COVID-19 in El Salvador, the Salvadoran public continues to wholeheartedly approve of the handling of pandemic by Nayib Bukele's government.   That approval is driven both by concrete actions such as the early acquisition of vaccines, consistent public health messages, and hospital improvements, as well as by the sophisticated government public relations machinery telling the public how well the pandemic was being handled.            Verifying those claims with actual data is much more difficult, however.  The Ministry of Health has declared as confidential , and not subject to disclosure under the public information law, a wide variety of data regarding the pandemic and the government's response. What we know -- the official COVID 19 case count The official count of confirmed cases  of COVID-19 in El Salvador as of February 27, 2022 is 156,364. What we don't know -- the ...

October was the deadliest month of the COVID pandemic in El Salvador according to official government statistics.  Despite the surge of cases of the virus in this third wave of contagion in the country, the government stayed the course with its plan to vaccinate its way out of the pandemic starting with the arrival of the first shipments of vaccine into the country in February.   Bars, restaurants, churches and sporting events remained open. The government regularly posts the totals of first, second and third dose vaccinations administered on a daily basis.   As of yesterday, November 8,  4,348,302 - have received at least one dose 3,923,083 - have received two doses 476,490 - have received a third booster shot According to Salvadoran government figures from the EHPM study , the population of El Salvador is approximately 6.7 million, and there are approximately 600,000 children ages 5 and under who are not yet eligible to receive the vaccines. Thus 64.9% ...

Two of the leading emphases of the Bukele government have been its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its roll-out of Bitcoin as legal tender with a government-promoted Chivo wallet app. Whether you agree with those policies or not, the government has declared most of the information around those policies to be confidential information not to be revealed to the public. When the government says it is doing a world-class job managing the pandemic, it withholds the information necessary to verify the claim. When the government says millions of Salvadorans are using the Chivo wallet app and the country is benefiting, it declines to share the underlying financial information. Here is a selection of the unanswered questions about COVID response and the Chivo wallet.  This is information which would promote transparency and increase trust around pandemic response and the government's Bitcoin initiatives. COVID-19 Since the official COVID death toll only includes persons with a COV...

  Daily confirmed cases El Salvador is in the middle of a third wave of COVID-19 cases acknowledges the government .  The country recorded 324 confirmed cases on September 12, the highest confirmed daily total since mid-January of this year at the height of a post-holiday wave of cases.  The 324 cases equates to a high 13% test positivity rate on the approximate 2500 tests run by the government lab.  (The government does not report test results performed by private labs or other entities and has held the daily number of tests steady since May 2020).   The official confirmed death toll is 3,043 out of 99,701 confirmed cases, for a mortality rate of 3%.  You can see a set of all the El Salvador confirmed COVID-19 information at Our World in Data .   The actual death toll is unknown but certainly much higher . As always, the scarcity of quality data being released by the government continues to be a challenge in assessing the extent of the pande...

In an acknowledgment that El Salvador is experiencing an upsurge in COVID-19 cases, the government has imposed a 90 day suspension on gatherings of people in sporting events, concerts, rallies and municipal festivals.  The municipal government in San Salvador then immediately announced the suspension of activities for the first week of August in the city’s patron saint celebrations. For the moment, bars, restaurants, religious services and public transportations are unaffected by the new measures.  The Ministry of Culture announced that public museums, theaters and exhibition spaces would also be closed for the next 90 days.   The Catholic hierarchy announced the cessation of processions and festivities, but scheduled masses will continue with masses and social distancing. Schools are still being held in a hybrid in-person plus virtual fashion, although parents have the option to be entirely virtual.  Because of localized outbreaks of the virus, 19 schools are prese...

El Salvador is in a race to vaccinate its population in time to avoid another possible wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths.   The country hit an important milestone this week as more than one million people are now fully vaccinated, mostly with two doses of the Chinese Coronavac vaccine.  This milestone was reached at the same time the country is seeing an uptick in cases of COVID-19.  The government confirmed 198 cases of the virus yesterday.  The last time the country saw that many confirmed cases was on February 13 when the country was on a downward trend from its second wave of cases which had peaked in January.  There was also a jump in the number of cases listed as moderate, critical or grave.  One question is whether the variants of the virus detected in various countries worldwide are making their presence known in El Salvador.   With limited gene sequencing of samples, it is difficult to say.   To date, the Ministry of ...

This article originally appeared on the website of InsightCrime with the headline  Pandemic Spending Immunity Deepens El Salvador Corruption Concerns . By Alex Papadovassilakis With a new law granting immunity to El Salvador officials accused of mismanaging coronavirus funds and the resignation of a prosecutor looking into pandemic-related spending, President Nayib Bukele and allies are wasting no time undermining a major corruption investigation aimed at his administration. The National Assembly has approved legislation that makes it impossible to scrutinize direct purchases related to the pandemic and shields officials from corruption allegations linked to acquiring COVID-19 supplies. The law, submitted to congress on Bukele’s instruction, was approved May 5, just days after congress voted to oust the country’s Attorney General, Raúl Melara, who in November 2020 had launched a criminal investigation into irregular purchases made by Bukele officials using emergency funds. Buke...

El Salvador hit a milestone today as it passed 1 million doses of coronavirus vaccine administered to the country's residents.   The Salvadoran government has been acquiring a variety of vaccines to administer to the population:   2 million doses purchased from Astra Zeneca, 2 million doses purchased from CoronaVac,  4.4 million doses purchased Pfizer/BionTech  150,000 doses of CoronaVac donated by China 181,000 doses through UN Covax program (Pfizer and AstaZeneca)  The healthcare ministry has been giving shots at a steady pace above 40,000 doses per day El Salvador's vaccination rate of 13.7 % of the population having received at least one dose compares to the worldwide rate of 7.2% according to Our World in Data .  Among countries in the Americas,  El Salvador ranks in the middle of the pack for percentage of population with at least one dose received.  It is worth noting, however, that second doses appear to be trailing first doses...

While relations between the Salvadoran government and the Biden administration in Washington are currently strained, China continues to advance its own agenda through support of various projects in El Salvador.  Most recently, Chinese "vaccine diplomacy" was deployed in El Salvador with a donation of 150,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine and the facilitation of purchases of 2 million more.    El Salvador broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and established diplomatic ties with the Peoples Republic of China in 2018 during the FMLN administration of Salvador Sanchez Ceren.  The Chinese promised $150 million in donations and were pushing forward to acquire rights to manage the port of La Union.     The El Salvador-China relationship was reset after Nayib Bukele defeated the FMLN to become president.  At the outset, as he wooed the US, Bukele appeared to favor a more distant relationship with China.  Shortly after his election, he spoke to Tru...

On Sunday 1 million doses of the CoronaVac vaccine manufactured by Chinese pharmaceutical company SinoVac arrived in El Salvador .   With the arrival of this two dose vaccine, El Salvador will now have the quantity of vaccine necessary to start vaccinating the general public. Prior to the arrival of the shipment from China, El Salvador had received three smaller shipments of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines which have been deployed to inoculate front-line healthcare workers and members of the police and military.  The CoronaVac shipment represents one half of a 2 million dose purchase by El Salvador from SinoVac. The first Salvadorans who will begin to receive the CoronaVac vaccine today are  the country's teachers in advance of schools reopening on April 6. The plans for which group will receive the vaccine in which order are never known until there is some tweet or statement to the press shortly before.  After public school teachers, it appears that the govern...

On March 11, 2020, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele issued his first emergency decree to respond to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.   This week Thursday, exactly one year later, El Salvador received its second shipment of vaccines and finally plans to partially reopen schools closed by that first decree.  Today we look back at the past year with its lockdowns and quarantines, its conflicts among branches of government, and the ups and downs of a pandemic which still afflicts the country. That first executive decree on March 11 also prohibited the entry into El Salvador of anyone who is not a Salvadoran citizen or permanent resident, effective that same day.   Any Salvadoran or resident who returned to the country following the decree was subject to a thirty day quarantine, which did not depend on the country from which the person came or whether the person was exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19. The decree suspended classes in all public and private scho...