Mortality from COVID-19 in Amazonian and Andean original indigenous populations of Peru

• Published in: Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease
• Main Authors: Agueda Muñoz-del-Carpio-Toia, Marco Bartolo-Marchena, Vicente A. Benites-Zapata, Percy Herrera-Añazco
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2023
• Subjects: Mortality; COVID -19; Original indigenous populations; Amazonian; Andean; Arctic medicine. Tropical medicine; RC955-962; Infectious and parasitic diseases; RC109-216; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmaid.2023.102658; https://doaj.org/article/231e6a4323464d4189451ed5125be40d

Objective: To compare the mortality rates from COVID-19 among indigenous populations of the Amazon and Andean regions of Peru during the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. Methods: Secondary analysis of 33,567 data from the COVID-19 Notification System of the National Epidemiology Center, Prevention and Control of Diseases (CDC-Peru), from the years 2020–2022. The variables were age, sex, belonging to the Andean or Amazonian ethnic group, number and type of symptoms and risk conditions, abnormal findings in chest X-rays, year of data collection for hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Poisson family generalized linear regression models with logarithmic linkage and robust variance were used to establish differences in mortality between ethnic groups. Crude and adjusted risk ratio (RR) with 95 % confidence intervals (CI) were calculated. Results: 33,567 participants with an average age of 33.6 years were included, 44.4 % were men and 70.2 % belonged to the Amazonian ethnic group. Most of those affected by COVID-19 presented 2 symptoms (38.8 %), 4.8 % presented some risk condition, 1451 (4.3 %) were hospitalized, and 433 (1.3 %) died. The adjusted analysis showed that the Andean group, compared to the Amazonian, tended to have a higher probability of death, and this association was statistically significant, RR =7.6, 95 % CI (5.5–10.5). Conclusions: Patients from Andean indigenous communities had an almost 8 times higher risk of death from COVID-19.