BATTLE FOR GUAYAQUIL

How the woman mayor of Ecuador’s biggest city beat back the pandemic

- MILAN SIME MARTINIC

Covid-19 has taken more territory and broken more defences across the planet than Genghis Khan, Attila and Alexander the Great combined, and it looms over humanity with a menace that appears to leave no refuge. At the current rate of doubling of casualties, the world could see some 36 million deaths in a year, and over 140 million dead just four months later. In this world war, humanity is fighting to survive and dominate a strand of DNA that itself is hard-coded to survive and dominate. The battles fought in this war are a record of reference for the rest of humanity.

“The war on Covid-19 cannot be fought in the emergency rooms and ICUs but in its breeding grounds—in the homes and neighbourhoods,” says Guayaquil Mayor Cynthia Viteri. “You have to take from it the element of surprise. Using the knowledge that you develop, you avoid open battle in the hospitals, you launch raids and surprise the virus in the zones and barrios where it is beginning to gain ground.” The Ecuadorian city of three million was the earliest example of Covid-19 horror in the Americas. Now, it deserves another title: The city that beat back Covid-19.

Viteri knows well that waves of aftershock might come, yet she is focusing on the takeaways from what has already happened and why it happened when the city was at its lowest moment—deaths in one day—and how it turned the tide, reaching a zero-death toll in just 34 days.