The COVID-AM blog is a partnership between the UMI 3157 iGLOBES and the Institut des Amériques, coordinated by François-Michel Le Tourneau, Deputy Director and Marion Magnan, researcher at the Institute. About the blog.

Alexis Sierra is a geographer, Professor at CY Cergy Paris University and treasurer at the Institut des Amériques

On March 6, Colombia documented its first Covid-19 case, a student returning from Italy. The media title "Llegó el coronavirus" ("The coronavirus has arrived").

However, the crisis has already been palpable for several days. Wearing a mask is generalized and controlling the temperature of travelers arriving at the Bogotá International Airport customs  is quasi systematic. These emergency measures, absent at that time in Paris, show a very strong response by the local authorities, as well as in Perou and Ecuador. They bring up the significance of the notion of crisis itself, largely used to the point of dulling it, in combination with the notions of risk and disaster. Analyzing public action in these three countries shows that the crisis is less defined by the presence of a disruptive element, here the SARS COV 2 virus, than by a diagnosis of the situation, at a given time, according to a pool of knowledge including an understanding of the spread of the disease in Europe, but also that takes the specificities of the region into account. This diagnosis then leads to the creation of a risk that justifies radical and early measures which immediately impacts the population with force and unequally, launching the start of a "crisis" phase.   

This strong response is not new in this particular region: on July 4, 1997, even though the scientists hadn't wholly confirmed the arrival of El Niño (a periodic meteorological phenomena bringing rain and floods on the South American pacifique front), the Ecuadorian government had declared a state of emergency, a constitutional provision in case of catastrophy. So, a risk situation, anticipating a potential disaster, is defined politically here as a crisis situation. It is true that in those days the disturbances were limited and really helped the president muster exceptional resources. However, expecting a disaster was really a time for evaluating the potential consequences of the phenomena on agricultural production, tourism, infrastructures and services to the population. The study of prior situations, such as Perou, shows how crisis and disaster do not often overlap and that provoking the first one is usually anticipated for fear of not being able to handle the other.

In a pandemic, the risk that legitimizes this unprecedented disturbance in national life is determined by evaluating the ability to treat the sick. The number of hospital beds and doctors is clearly insufficient to handle a sudden influx of seriously sick people. Whereas the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 2.7 beds per 1000 inhabitants, Colombia has 1.7 [1], Perou 1.5 [2] and Ecuador 1.4 [3]. This ratio is even smaller for services specializing in respiratory illnesses and intensive care.

 Furthermore, the global hospital capacity is all the more reduced in these countries where local epidemics strain the health system. When the Covid-19 epidemic started, Perou was already in a public health crisis because of the dengue (more than 4000 cases at the end of January). In this country, intensive care units in the public sector were already at 90 % of their capacity before the arrival of SARS-CoV-2, while simultaneously revealing a huge unequal access to healthcare.

The threat then that provoked the crisis beginning of March is the crash of the health system. Aware of this weakness, the public health authorities chose to mobilize governments and populations so that something that hadn't even started yet (as opposed to Europe), effectively didn't happen. An exercise such as this is difficult and subject to controversy and only works if there is a minimum of trust (or fear). The perception of risk was therefore created using information that came from Europe and was narrated. Therefore studying crises in Andean countries, as a diagnostic and decision making period, is a heuristic way of grasping the power struggles and the weaknesses of these societies.