From NPR:
Haiti has one of the lowest death rates from COVID-19 in the world.
As of the end of April, only 254 deaths were attributed to COVID-19 in Haiti over the course of the entire pandemic. The Caribbean nation, which often struggles with infectious diseases, has a COVID-19 death rate of just 22 per million. In the U.S. the COVID-19 death rate is 1,800 per million, and in parts of Europe. the fatality rate is approaching 3,000 deaths per million.
Haiti’s success is not due to some innovative intervention against the virus. Most people have given up wearing masks in public. Buses and markets are crowded. And Haiti hasn’t yet administered a single COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Jean “Bill” Pape says a combination of factors have kept the death rate so low.
Pape played a role similar to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s in the U.S. The 74-year-old Haitian doctor served as the co-chair of a national commission in Haiti to deal with COVID-19, leading the country’s effort to deal with the crisis. But the commission was dissolved earlier this year.
“The reason mainly is because we have very, very few cases of COVID,” Pape says. The local health agency Pape heads, known as GHESKIO, actually shuttered its COVID-19 units last fall due to a lack of patients.
Pape says the country has pretty much gone back to the way life was pre-pandemic. Schools are open. Thousands of people packed the northern coastal Port-de-Paix for Carnival in February.
“Most people don’t wear a mask,” he says.
Not only have outdoor markets reopened; they were never completely closed.
Sheltering in place and working from home are luxuries most Haitians can’t afford. As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haitians on average earn less than $2,000 per year according to the U.N. And most, Pape says, have gone back to work.
“Because if they don’t work, they don’t eat, their family doesn’t eat,” he says.