In Peru, nearly 2.5% of all men over age 60 may have died from COVID-19

Posted on by under Life in Peru

Just a quick calculation on my part, if you see any serious errors or omissions please let me know:

  • MINSA is currently reporting 18,589 deaths in men over age 60. See page 5 of the data, the actual nr. will probably be higher when you open the page as the data is updated regularly.
  • The OpenCovid-Peru project is showing that the total COVID-19 death toll in Peru, based on analysis of death certificates filed, is likely to be about 2.4 times higher than the fatalities reported by MINSA. In my opinion that is a reliable estimate. That would put the actual death toll among men over age 60 around 44,000 to date.
  • The population of men over 60 in Peru should be in the magnitude of 1.8 million according to demographic data from the CIA.

Do the math and it appears that COVID-19 has already killed nearly 2.5 percent of men over age 60. That’s about 1 per graduating class if you were in an industrialized country. Peru is just now entering the worst of the second wave, only time will tell what the true impact of COVID-19 will be. So far COVID-19 has been devastating here in Peru and there’s no sign of it letting up any time soon.

2 thoughts on “In Peru, nearly 2.5% of all men over age 60 may have died from COVID-19”

  1. It is a terrible thing. I hope you and your family can avoid the disease. Are vaccines becoming available yet? Our state of Iowa does not seems to have much vaccine and does not have a good plan to implement when we do get it. I will be 74 soon and still don’t know my timeline for receiving it.

    Reply

    • In December a big scandal broke out around vaccine purchase in Peru, or rather, lack of vaccine purchase. The government had not signed any contracts to buy vaccines and was not close to signing any. Only because the media blew it up into a big scandal the government rather hurriedly made a deal to buy the Sinopharm (Chinese) vaccine. A million doses (enough to vaccinate half a million people) are supposed to be delivered in the next 10 days or so.

      I don’t see mass vaccination happening any time soon here in Peru. As much as everyone would like to see this pandemic be over with, I think it has been a big failure of leadership not to accept the reality (or at least the possibility) that we’re going to live with this virus for the foreseeable future.

      Reply

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