Tropical City Ravaged by Coronavirus Taken Over by Ecuador Army
Source: Bloomberg News
Stephan Kueffner and Daniel Cancel, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- Soldiers have taken over street corners in poor neighborhoods. The mayor is answering to an emergency committee run by the army. Hundreds of curfew violators have been detained.
Nowhere has the coronavirus hit harder in Latin America than in Ecuador and nowhere more so than in the steamy coastal business center of Guayaquil, where there is a military-run lockdown. The city and its surroundings account for 70% of the more than 1,200 confirmed cases. The mayor and four other heads of suburbs have all tested positive. Twenty-nine Ecuadorians have died.
Ecuador is a country of 17.5 million people who depend on oil, shrimp, cut flowers and banana exports to keep their dollarized economy humming and this couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Hospitals are facing stress even with testing showing a lag of two weeks to get definitive results. So desperate was the Guayaquil mayor, Cynthia Viteri, to protect the population, that she ordered police pickup trucks to the airport to prevent empty European flights from landing to ferry out nationals who were stuck in the quarantine.
Read more: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/tropical-city-ravaged-by-coronavirus-taken-over-by-ecuador-army-1.1412678
Guayaquil, Ecuador
= new reply since forum marked as read
