While governments are attempting to contain the coronavirus, they are also trying to contain civilians as well from participating in demonstrations where people are congested together in liberation fronts against law enforcement. Social distancing is all but forgotten amid protests.

In a report by Al Jazeera, dismissed worker Juan Diaz stated that he and the other protestors were not afraid of the virus. Instead, he explained that they were afraid of the hunger that their families were going through during the lockdowns.

Demonstrators lack basic resources to survive without government support

Poorer people in Latin America said that they were the ones suffering the most from measures like lockdowns and expenditure cuts.

Hospitals in Brazil were overwhelmed to the point of surpassing Britain and leading as the second most infected country in the globe. Patients at Rio de Janeiro shared rooms with people who died from coronavirus because staff were too busy to remove the body.

One nurse at the union said that 90% of the healthcare institutions in the state were dealing with double the patients and half the team. They also emphasized the stress that the medical staff was facing to meet the needs of the patients.

Professor at Harvard University Marcia Castro said that the response of the Brazilian government was "far from ideal". She also acknowledged a lack of uniform governance that should have been coordinated by the leaders at different levels.

The country was notorious for its low testing rate, and recently the University of São Paulo Medical School published a study that showed the true figure of coronavirus cases might be 15 times higher than the official count.

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Latin America the new epicenter

Last Friday, emergency director of the World Health Organization Dr. Mike Ryan said that South America was the new "epicenter" for the coronavirus.

As of yet, Brazil has over 370,000 positive coronavirus cases, making the country the second highest in the world, moving past even Great Britain at an alarming rate. More worrying is that they reported a higher daily death toll than the United States this week, with 807 deaths next to 620 respectively.

Nearby countries like Mexico, Chile, and Peru are also having a poor management of the pandemic while the U.S. cases are flattening and the rest of Europe are seeing a decline in theirs.

Peru ranks 12th in the world with more than 120,000 confirmed cases, more than what China reported theirs was, and Chile is recording over thousands of new cases each passing day.

Head of the COVID-19 Operations Command Dr. Pilar Mazzetti admitted that Peru was in bad shape. Their health ministry is currently developing a molecular diagnostic test for COVID-19, which will be made available soon.

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera said that their healthcare system was at the brink of collapse.

In the region, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention stated that over 750,000 cases were recorded and more than 40,000 already died from coronavirus-related health complications. Many analysts believe that health officials were underreporting the cases, while at the same time people could be dying undiagnosed.