In July 2020, priest and physician Raymond Portelli held a mass paying homage to local educators who died of COVID-19. And in the evening I'm a priest," he says with a laugh. Padre Raymundo, as he's known, runs a medical clinic in Iquitos on the ground floor of his church 6 days a week. "It was sort of a perfect storm," says Leguia, who directs the genomics laboratory at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Mariana Leguia, an infectious disease expert in Lima, says a combination of factors made COVID so deadly in Peru. the COVID death rate is roughly 2,400 per million. In neighboring Ecuador the mortality rate is just over 1,800 per million.
In Peru COVID officially caused nearly 6,000 deaths for every 1 million Peruvians. Peru's death toll from COVID is now the worst in the world, far higher than any of its neighbors and twice the rate of the United States.
The disaster unfolding in Iquitos would quickly play out across the South American nation. "But sincerely, we thought it wasn't going to be that disastrous and it wasn't going to come to Iquitos." "We were hearing news about the pandemic in other countries," says Catholic priest Raymond Portelli, who is also a physician. The first COVID cases appeared in Iquitos in March of 2020 at a time when cases were starting to pop up in many parts of the world. But that didn't turn out to be the case for Iquitos. In the early days of the COVID pandemic being isolated seemed like an advantage.