Impact of COVID-19 in Ecuador: From inaccurate data to using excess mortality.

Abstract

COVID19 has hit Ecuador drastically. In fact, until today around 75.000 confirmed cases and almost 9.000 deaths because of the virus has been showed by Official Statistics in the country. Good decisions can be made having data of high quality, but the national public health system was not able to provide such as input. Because of this, multiple sources of information and insights about the behavior of the pandemic in the country has appeared. From journalists and economists to health experts, all have published graphics and statistics that show how bad was managed the sanitary crisis in Ecuador. The typical elements to track a pandemic in any country are contagious and mortality curves but the difference in the results across the government, academic units and experts has woke up an intense debate. As information was not accurate, many people left to pay attention and as a result it might be seen that this disinformation contributed to the increase of contagious in our country. The crisis has been hard for many countries but international media like The Economist¹ and Financial Times² in United Kingdom developed an easy method to track the evolution of pandemics in any country.