COVID overwhelms Latin America, Caribbean as region hits 1M casualties

Freshly dug open graves line a municipal cemetery in Tijuana, just one of thousands of burial sites across Latin America and the Caribbean where gravediggers are making room for the region’s one million COVID-19 victims.

The region hit the grim milestone Friday, with South America now recording the highest per capita deaths from the infection in the world. Patients afflicted with COVID-19 are overwhelming fragile and underfunded health care systems in countries where large percentages of the population live in abject poverty, and have been unable to enter lockdown, according to a Reuters report.