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The haphazard, politicized response to the pandemic by the country’s leaders has put the government’s own officials and supporters at particular risk.
By Frances Robles
A series of recent deaths in Nicaragua, including mayors, judges, police officers, sports officials, university presidents and government bureaucrats, point to the terrifying truth that the coronavirus is ravaging this Central American country, the government does not publicly recognize it.
For government critics, deaths are the result of President Daniel Ortega’s randomized and politicized reaction to the pandemic’s encouragement of wearing masks or measures of social estrangement, and little evidence and no orders to maintain the house or closures. Instead, the government encouraged giant meetings.
This reaction turned out to have hit the members of the ruling Sandinista party of the toughest National Liberation Front.
Several young epidemiologists, virologists and similar specialists have stated in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s coronavirus control “has been the erratic maxim of any country in the world to date.”
“They were the only ones who circulated without a mask,” said Dora Maria Tellez, a former fitness minister under the Sandinistas who broke up with the party, “while the mask became aware of it as a sign of opposition.”
Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, said the death of officials was evident when looking at the National Assembly and many empty chairs were seen on the Sandinista side.
“You can’t forget that, ” he said. “You can’t hide it. You can’t hide that,” he added. “It is obvious, obvious, that the Sandinistas are dying.
However, the deaths of some have been publicly attributed to Covid-19, as is the case with the maximum deaths from the virus in Nicaragua. Many are officially known as atypical pneumonia.
Officially, the government reports that only 99 other people have been killed by the virus, the Citizens Covid-19 Observatory, an unnamed organization of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, has recorded 2,397 probable deaths.
Mr. Sacasa, the former ambassador, said that one of the Sandinistas lawmakers who died of Covid-19 in late May was her cousin, María Manuela Sacasa de Prego, she also has cancer.
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