Nicaragua’s Ruling Sandinistas Fall Victim to Covid-19, Highlighting the Disease’s Spread

A string of recent deaths across Nicaragua — including mayors, judges, police officials, sports figures, university rectors and government bureaucrats — is pointing to the chilling reality that the coronavirus is devastating this Central American country, although the government is not publicly acknowledging it.

To critics of the government, the deaths are a result of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. Instead, the government has encouraged large gatherings.

That response seems to have hit members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party the hardest.

Several young epidemiologists, virologists and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s handling of the coronavirus “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”