About 15 students stood outside the Caracas University Hospital in the Venezuelan capital, behind them a grim stage set: bin bags arranged to look like corpses. The students were grieving and angry. To them, the deaths of several hundred health workers from COVID-19 were personal. Many of them knew the medics that have suffered due to shortages of personal protection equipment (PPE) and the poor conditions of Venezuela’s hospitals. Student councillor Jesús Mendoza chalked the handling of the pandemic up to another of Nicolás Maduro’s callously broken promises. Venezuela’s authoritarian president had guaranteed ten million vaccine doses by May, but managed to secure barely a quarter, not enough to cover even the most vulnerable of the country’s people.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s medical community is warning that official COVID data is not credible and inadequate testing means there is little indication of the pandemic’s severity. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Venezuela is testing anywhere between 2,100 and 2,600 people a day, compared to 25,000 to 35,000 in Colombia.
As of 14 June, Maduro’s government had registered just 2,764 deaths in Venezuela, which is low in comparison to the numbers reported by its neighbours. Colombia had recorded 95,000 deaths by that same date, Ecuador 21,000 and Peru 187,000.
