Venezuela Limits Covid Tests, Then Claims Low Rates: LatAm Wrap

(Bloomberg) -- With Covid-19 cases erupting across Venezuela, the government of Nicolas Maduro has restricted testing to two state laboratories around Caracas, preventing private and university labs from participating and raising fears that coronavirus will go undiagnosed while the country claims a low caseload.

“They are controlling epidemiological information as if it were a state secret,” said Felix Oletta, a doctor specializing in infectology who was health minister in the late 1990s. “Implementing social control through a monopoly of information is more important to them than shortening the diagnosis period.”

Compared with its neighbors, Venezuela appears to have suffered mildly from the pandemic, but its descent over the past seven years into dysfunction and humanitarian disaster makes it hard to take the official data seriously. It has lost some 5 million people to emigration and now, with 28 million inhabitants, claims to have had only about 12,000 cases and 116 deaths. Latin America’s tally stands at 3.9 million, with about 167,000 deaths.

However real those numbers are, cases seem to have doubled in the past few weeks, probably as a result of Venezuelans returning from Colombia and Brazil, where the pandemic has hit hard. Experts say the frail health system will soon be overwhelmed.

The government has granted the National Institute of Hygiene in Caracas and a newly opened satellite lab nearby the only licenses to run tests, refusing to authorize a number of private and university labs, according to five people with knowledge of the situation. This is despite a June agreement with the Pan-American Health Organization to decentralize testing. Venezuela’s government didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Confiscating Equipment

Labs fear that if they conduct tests without permission the government will take action against them, including confiscating their equipment, according to a lab supplier with direct knowledge of the situation. In early March, health ministry officials seized between 100 and 200 tests from a private lab in an eastern Caracas hospital.

Judith Leon, president of the Venezuelan Federation of Bioanalysts, said her group is advising private labs not to buy equipment or kits for testing because the threat of seizure or criminal investigation is high. During the 2009 H1N1 viral outbreak, a few labs were closed for processing tests without government consent, she said.

Since results are taking from two to four weeks to arrive, if at all, many who are ill are left wondering if they have contracted Covid-19 despite having been tested.

“You lose the opportunity to track and isolate patients when you have to wait 14 days,” said Jose Manuel Olivares, an internist and opposition legislator, at a press briefing last week. He said at least 72 people have died from coronavirus who’ve been excluded from the official statistics.

Escorted by Military

While some samples are transported to the Caracas labs by plane, most go by car, sometimes escorted by the military, said two doctors and two legislators with knowledge of the process. When the tests arrive, they join a large group of other samples from across the country.

The main Caracas lab has the capacity to process 2,000 tests daily, while the capacity of the newly opened lab hasn’t been made public. The 2,000-per-day rate is well below the World Health Organization’s guidelines, since daily positive cases amount to about 20% of the total tested. The guidelines call for that rate to be below 10%.

A doctor at Maracaibo’s hard-hit University Hospital in western Venezuela -- who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal -- said she was discharged after a three-week hospitalization without the results of two tests. They never came. She can’t return to work because she has yet to receive the results of a third test. Some of the dead in Maracaibo never make it into the nation’s official tally.

The government says it is stepping up testing capacity. A third lab is being set up, also near Caracas, according to the Pan-American Health Organization, but nothing in other parts of the country where the pandemic is spreading rapidly.

The new lab will work as an extension of the National Institute of Hygiene and all the information will be centralized through the health ministry, said a virologist familiar with the progress of one of the new labs. The country needs testing facilities in the countryside, especially in Zulia state, the virologist added.

As Leon, the bioanalyst, put it, “We all know cases are being under-reported. The government doesn’t care about the real number.”

Elsewhere in Latin America:

• Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency on Tuesday approved a clinical trial of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s experimental vaccine. It’ll be the third candidate to undergo testing in Latin America’s largest nation, along with shots being developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and AstraZeneca Plc.
• Evidence that the pandemic is taking its toll on Mexico’s economy is piling up, with retail sales tumbling 23.7% in May, topping estimates for a 20% drop. A biweekly survey conducted by Citigroup Inc. shows analysts now expect gross domestic product to shrink 9.6% this year versus the prior forecast for a 9.2% contraction.
• Chile reported the lowest number of new Covid-19 cases since May 12 as some areas of Santiago enter their fourth month of quarantines. The nation, which has the best rate of testing among major Latin American economies, is preparing a plan for phased reopenings after positivity rates fell below 15% from a peak of 36% in June.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.