More than 55,000 Colombians have died from covid-19 in less than a year. This is a figure that far exceeds the number of violent deaths in the worst years of the Colombian armed conflict.
These are in fact two very different comparisons, due to the nature of the cause of death. But if viewed from a historical context, the comparison can provide the magnitude of the loss of life in the country due to the pandemic, which became the first cause of death in the country in 2020, according to information from the National Administrative Department of Statistics. (Dane).
“In a single year, in a country that had been registering a continuous decline in deaths for 15 years from ‘lethal interventions, war operations, including aftermath’, the pandemic generated 10.4 times the deaths registered by events associated with the conflict in 15 years”, Juan Daniel Oviedo, director of Dane, told Citizen Free Press en Español, citing statistics from that entity.
The numbers of the pandemic vs. those of the conflict
Last Thursday, the Dane delivered a report on the deaths confirmed by covid-19 in 2020: between March and December of that year, 50,059 Colombians died from covid-19.
In the same way, Oviedo informed Citizen Free Press en Español figures of deaths due to the armed conflict in Colombia, which his entity classifies as deaths due to “Illegal intervention, war operations, including aftermath”, within a category of “homicides”.
In the last 15 years – between 2005 and 2019 – 4,819 deaths have been reported in the context of the conflict, according to Dane figures. The deadliest year, according to these figures, was 2005, when 796 conflict deaths were recorded. In a single year, 2020, more than 50,000 Colombians died from covid-19. There are 10.4 times more deaths from coronavirus than from armed conflict.
“Covid-19 changed history and became the leading cause of death for both men and women,” said Oviedo. “That means that the covid has a supremely important magnitude compared to the armed conflict,” said Oviedo.
“It is a huge magnitude,” added the director of the Dane.
The victims of the armed conflict in Colombia
In 60 years – 1958 and 2018 – the National Center for Historical Memory reported 262,197 deaths due to armed conflict in Colombia. According to these figures, the year with the highest number of fatalities in the armed conflict was 2002, with 24,105 deaths among civilians and combatants. “The vast majority of fatalities left by the war were members of the civilian population: 215,005 civilians compared to 46,813 combatants,” says the CNMH.
But the coronavirus pandemic has so far left almost 56,000 deaths in less than a year. This is just over 20% of the total deaths caused by the armed conflict in those 60 years.
Ariel Ávila, political scientist and deputy director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation (PARES), described the number of deaths from coronavirus as “a dramatic case,” since, as he said, deaths from coronavirus almost reached homicides in all of 2020.
“Colombia has one of the worst pandemic management indicators at this time,” Avila said. “We had one of the longest quarantines in Latin America (from March 20 to June) but after that the indicators soared, we managed to slow down the virus for a while, but after that, the covid cases skyrocketed.”
For Dr. Carlos Arturo Álvarez Moreno, an infectious disease physician, who has a master’s degree in Clinical Epidemiology and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences, the death toll from conflict vs. coronavirus help to give a context of what we are experiencing.
“They are not that they are comparable, but it does imply for us to see the magnitude of what we are experiencing,” he said. “Here we are talking about a single disease caused by a single virus that becomes and displaces many other causes of mortality.”
Excess mortality due to covid-19 in Colombia
According to the Dane, the coronavirus is now the leading cause of death in the country.
“We had a country that historically the leading cause of death was associated with ischemic heart diseases, but in less than ten months the pandemic managed to turn around extraordinarily and quickly and Covid-19 became the leading cause of death throughout the country,” said Oviedo.
Covid-19 generated in Colombia an “excess mortality” of 35.8%, said Oviedo.
“All the deaths from covid-19 occurred in the capital cities of the country and in the five departments where a little more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of the Colombian economy is generated,” said Oviedo. In addition, as Colombia is a highly informal country, the hit to the economy left by the pandemic was reflected in unemployment: the country dropped unemployment levels in a decade, Oviedo said.
In 2019 the country had an unemployment rate of 10.5% and in December 2020 it reached 15.6% unemployment. And the three main cities of the country were left with an unemployment rate of 18.2%.
“We estimate on average in 2020 they are equivalent to the same employed population that the country had in 2010,” said Oviedo. “In other words, it is a delay of almost a decade in terms of the volume of the employed population that implies an important challenge for economic reactivation in a country where we coexist in a very important way with informality.”
According to Ávila, as Colombia is a country that lives mainly from informality, one of the errors in handling the pandemic was such a long confinement.
“Colombia later could not close again because it has an informal economy, impossible to close, people live off the newspaper,” said Ávila of the PARES Foundation.
And also, Ávila adds, “the most complex thing about this is that there is no solution in sight. There is no indicator that shows us that this will end in 2021, we will be this way all year.
Colombia, for now, hopes to stop the rate of infections and deaths from covid-19, with a promise from President Iván Duque, who said that vaccination would begin on February 20, but so far no vaccines have arrived in the country. Unlike its neighbors like Peru and Ecuador and several other countries in the region.