COVID-19 Report
ECLAC-UNDRR March 2021
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic: an opportunity for a systemic approach to disaster risk for the Caribbean Foreword by the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) The COVID-19 pandemic is a disaster that combines a biological threat with various vulnerabilities, such as the organizational and response capacity of health systems, overcrowding, informality, social work practices, and public transport. Disasters of this origin are not unknown in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dengue and cholera have caused the most epidemics in the region in the last fifty years. However, unlike other threats such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, which last for minutes, days, or weeks, an epidemic can last for years. In 2020, COVID-19 affected all the countries in the region. The human and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented. According to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, by November 2020 it had caused more than 18 times more deaths than all the epidemics that took place in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1970 and 2019. Furthermore, these deaths account for 63% of all those caused by disasters in the region in the same period. For the first time since records began, all the countries of the region have seen their economies contract at the same time, destroying jobs and driving up poverty and inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the cracks in the existing development pattern, and revealed its limitations, around the world, but particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. The pandemic has hit at a time when a development model with serious structural flaws has been the norm: growing inequality, high labour informality, weak and fragmented institutions —especially those related to social protection— and production and business structures with limited technological capabilities that are concentrated in sectors which depend on static comparative advantages, such as natural resources and low wages.
Contents Foreword by the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)..................................1 Foreword by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction......................................................3 Introduction............................................................4 I. Socioeconomic effects of COVID-19 on the Caribbean..............................................5 II. Towards a systemic approach to disaster risk in the Caribbean.......................14 III. Challenges, opportunities and recommendations for a risk-informed recovery and development in the Caribbean............................................27