The excess mortality from covid-19 in Nicaragua has been confirmed, indirectly, by the same Ortega regime that has tried to hide it. The 2022 Health Map, published by the Ministry of Health (Minsa), shows that last year there were fewer deaths in the country, which reveals that the high numbers of deaths in 2020 and 2021 were caused by the arrival of the pandemic in Nicaraguan territory.
According to the Ortega regime, since the first death from covid-19 was confirmed, on March 26, 2020, 245 people have died from this cause. However, an analysis of excess mortality by CONFIDENTIAL —based on data from the Health Map— shows that there were actually 17,192 deaths in the last three years.
These deaths are from people who had covid-19, but when they died they were classified as pneumonia, diabetes, heart attacks and hypertension to show a supposed control of the pandemic.
The four causes that reported up to three times more deaths, in the first two years of the pandemic, had a reduction in 2022 that the Minsa does not justify; but it is explained by the high levels of immunization that were reached last year, which prevented the development of serious cases and deaths, and also by the behavior of the variants of concern that were more contagious, but less lethal.
The pneumonia casescovid-19 related disease— registers the most noticeable reduction in deaths. After two consecutive years of quintupling the number of deaths from this cause: 2,844 deaths, in 2020, and 2,330, in 2021. The Minsa reported 513 deaths in 2022, which is the number of deaths that were registered before the pandemic.
“In short, there is a potential report of excess mortality in 2020 and 2021, more than 15,000 deaths than in previous years, and that this could be the real number attributable to covid-19.”, says the epidemiologist Álvaro Ramírez, who has made analysis of excess mortality due to covid in Nicaragua and was a Minsa official in the 1990s.
“The return of (deaths from) pneumonia to historical numbers really confirms that this increase was due to covid-19,” he adds.
Deaths from heart attacks continue to fluctuate
He first study of excess mortality in Nicaragua, made by CONFIDENTIALwas carried out in 2020, in which it was revealed that —in that year— there were 6,756 excess deaths from pneumonia, diabetes, heart attacks, and hypertension. In 2021, when the country suffered the second wave of covid-19 there was an excess mortality of 8058 deaths. In 2022, a surplus of 2,378 deaths is estimated, mainly due to heart attacks and hypertension. There were no excess deaths from pneumonia or diabetes.
In total, the estimate of 17,192 deaths is 70 times higher than the 245 officially admitted deaths. The Minsa assures that these people would have died between March 26, 2020 and July 12, 2022, when the last death from this cause was admitted. Since then, the authorities affirm that “there were no deaths attributable to covid-19.”
The World Health Organization (WHO)which maintains covid-19 as a public health emergency of international concern, has reported that between February 5 and March 5, there were 4.5 million new cases and 32,000 deaths.
In 2022, the WHO published an analysis of global excess mortality in which it indicated that between 2020 and 2021, between 12,095 and 16,517 citizens died in Nicaragua.
The excess mortality analysis of CONFIDENTIAL details that in the three years prior to covid-19 eight people died per day due to heart attacks. In 2020, this average rose to 14; in 2021 to 18; and in 2022 it remained at 14 per day.
Pneumonias had an average daily death of two, from 2017 to 2019. In the first year of the pandemic, deaths per day rose to eight, in 2021 to six, and in 2022 the average returned to two.
Deaths from diabetes, which averaged six a day in the three years leading up to 2020, rose to 11 in the first year of the pandemic, ten in 2021, and in 2022 they returned to six a day. The same occurred with deaths from hypertension.
Chronic population increased after the pandemic
The population with chronic diseases increased since 2020, Reveals the analysis to the Health Map data. Before the pandemic, there were records of a little more than 400,000 chronic Nicaraguans; however, by 2022 the number had risen to 711,183.
“The increase in the patterns of chronic diseases should be something that calls attention to the definition of protection policies for the population in health matters, and especially these Nicaraguans who are suffering from diseases and need support and protection from the authorities. ”, considers Dr. Ramírez.
Heart patients are the population that grew the most. In 2019 there were 15,908, but since the arrival of covid-19 it has tripled. By 2022 the number of patients rises to 43,448, which represents an increase of 173%. Meanwhile, patients with bronchial asthma doubled from 26,534 in 2019 to 53,658 in 2022.
“The increase in cases of bronchial asthma, the tripling of heart diseases, psychiatric patients and patients with chronic kidney diseases is striking. This should draw attention to why this increase occurred, which could be attributable to covid-19, but it is also necessary to assess why people are getting sicker”, assesses the epidemiologist.
Explain that, in the case of psychiatric illnesses —which went from 8,797 in 2019, to 22,467 in 2022—, could be related to covid-19, “because it is currently being analyzed that post-covid causes neuropsychiatric and psychological problems.”
Inconsistencies in hospitalizations
There are inconsistencies in the behavior of hospitalizations. According to him Health Map in 2020 and 2021 there were fewer people hospitalized. In 2019, 180,239 hospital discharges were admitted, but in 2020 they fell to 109,181, and in 2021 they rose to 139,587. However, in 2022 they increased to 156,467.
Doctors from private and public hospitals trusted CONFIDENTIAL that, during the first and second waves of covid-19, which occurred in the first two years of the pandemic, the country’s main hospitals collapsed. The number of hospitalizations was so high that the medical units used all their rooms to receive patients with serious conditions.
“It is quite contradictory when we compare hospitalizations with mortality; for example, deaths from pneumonia quadrupled in the years 2020 and 2021, but hospitalizations fell by almost 40%. So this reflects a non-serious handling of the data”, says Ramírez.
