La Paz
Bolivia’s interim president Jeanine Anez announced Thursday that she has tested positive for coronavirus.
“I’ve tested positive for COVID-19, I’m fine, I will work from isolation,” she tweeted. The 53-year-old said in a video on Twitter that she would remain in quarantine for 14 days before taking another test.
Anez becomes the second South American president in a matter of days to contract the coronavirus, after Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro announced his positive result on Tuesday.
Another high-ranking Latin American government official to contract the virus is Venezuela’s Constitutional Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, widely considered the second-most powerful person in the country after President Nicolas Maduro.
Four members of Anez’s cabinet had tested positive in recent days, while Senate President Eva Copa went into self-isolation on Wednesday as a precaution.
“Given many of them tested positive over the last week, I took the test and I was also positive,” said Anez.
The interim leader’s illness comes with Bolivia gearing up for a general election in less than two months, despite being in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
Anez initially opposed the September election, saying it should be postponed “one or two months” due to the pandemic, but eventually relented.
The conservative politician assumed the interim presidency in November after socialist former leader Evo Morales resigned and fled the country following three weeks of unrest over his controversial re-election.
Morales had stood for a potential fourth consecutive term despite the constitution limiting a president to two successive mandates.
Although he initially tried to hold onto power, he lost the backing of the armed forces after a report by the Organization of American States found evidence of election fraud in his victory.
Anez was third in the last opinion poll behind Luis Arce — the candidate for Morales’s Movement for Socialism party — and centrist former president Carlos Mesa.
“My solidarity and I hope for a speedy and complete recovery to the President @JeanineAnez,” Mesa, who was president from 2003-05, wrote on Twitter.
Bolivia, a country of 11 million, has recorded almost 43,000 coronavirus infections and more than 1,500 deaths.
The government expects there to be 130,000 cases by the time the election comes around. More than 12 million people worldwide have contracted the virus, and almost half of those have been in Latin America and the United States.
The United States notched up half that figure in just one day Thursday, with 65,551 new cases recorded by Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University — a new high.
The country, the hardest-hit in the world by the pandemic, has a total caseload of more than 3.1 million, with 133,195 deaths.
It has seen a spike in infections in recent weeks, and health experts worry the death rate may soon follow the same trajectory.
“We´re in a very difficult, challenging period right now,” top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said.
“I would think we need to get the states pausing in their opening process,” he said, although he added: “I don´t think we need to go back to an extreme of shutting down.”
US President Donald Trump, who has publicly disagreed with Fauci, has downplayed the spike. “For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven´t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better,” he tweeted.
“We have tested 40,000,000 people. If we did 20,000,000 instead, Cases would be half, etc.” The virus is still infecting new populations: the first case was recorded in northwest Syria on Thursday, reviving fears of disaster if the pandemic reaches the rebel bastion´s displacement camps. And the response remains chaotic in places already in the grip of outbreaks.—AFP
