Estelí was one of the three Nicaraguan departments that registered a higher increase in mortality in 2021, when Nicaragua suffered a strong outbreak of covid-19, reveal regional data from the Health Map, which were recently updated.
As reported by the Ministry of Health (Minsa) in 2021, for every 10,000 inhabitants, 61 people died, ten more than those reported in 2020, and 20 more than those registered in the two years before the pandemic. This increase in mortality is only surpassed by Managua, the department with the largest population in the country.
The increase reported in 2021 would be related to the impact of the second wave of covid-19 in the north of the country, which occurred between August and October of last year, when hospitals were saturated, there was a shortage of oxygen tanks and dozens of patients. they died waiting their turn to be intubated, the last resort doctors use to help patients breathe.
In total, the figures of the Health Map —analyzed by CONFIDENTIAL- indicate that between 2020 and 2021, there were some 2,573 deaths in Estelí, 700 more than the two years prior to the pandemic. Of this last figure, 452 would be attributable to covid-19.
Although the majority of citizens died from heart attacks, the cause of death that registered the greatest difference in the historical record was pneumonia. The department went from reporting nine deaths in 2019 to 170 in 2021. This figure is even four times higher than the 48 admitted in 2020.
The investigation “Excess mortality: More than 14,800 deaths attributable to covid-19 in 2020 and 2022”, published by CONFIDENTIAL, revealed that in Nicaragua there are 14,815 deaths attributable to the pandemic, but that they were classified as deaths from heart attacks, pneumonia, diabetes and hypertension. The Minsa admits only 218 deaths from coronavirus in 21 months.
Estelí Hospital was hit by a pandemic
During the outbreak of covid-19, Estelí was the hardest hit department in northern Nicaragua. Medical sources indicated that the San Juan de Dios Hospital reached its hospitalization limit, to the point that a doctor together with his nursing team came to be in charge of up to 25 beds in respiratory wards and dozens of people died without entering the Unit. Intensive Care Unit (ICU) due to lack of space and ventilators.
“This is the hospital in the north that is most collapsed. It is chaos, we are at the limit. The ICU has been kept full. A person enters, 24 or 48 hours later they die. If the patient gets complicated in the respiratory ward and there are no beds in Intensive Care, they wait for a person to die and then put him in, and if the conditions are not there, then he dies there,” sources close to this hospital said then.
Health sources estimate that, in this hospital, some 280 people died during the second wave, but there were many others who died at home or in private clinics; meanwhile, the Minsa only admitted one weekly death in the entire country.
The Citizen Observatory, which carries out independent monitoring in the face of the information gap, identified 207 deaths suspected of covid-19 in this department between August and October 2021.
Carazo report
The other department that also reports an increase in mortality similar to that of Estelí is Carazo. According to the Health Map, in 2019, deaths per 10,000 inhabitants were 53, but in 2020 they rose to 64, and in 2021 to 70.
The largest increase was due to pneumonia, which went from 24 in 2019 to 232 in 2021, this figure is a hundred more than that admitted in the first year of the pandemic. In this department, as in Estelí, there was also an oversaturation of hospitalized patients. Sources close to the Santiago Regional School Hospital, located in Jinotepe, Carazo, reported up to ten deaths per day.
The rest of the country’s departments show a slight increase of between ten and fifteen more deaths due to the same mortality rate before the pandemic and after. At a general level, the increase in mortality is undeniable. Before the pandemic, the country added between 24,000 and 25,000 deaths per year, but after the arrival of covid-19, the deceased exceeded 36,000, this excess according to independent doctors is only explained by the arrival of SAR-CoV-2 .
