A doctor in Brazil said this week that the shortage of COVID-19 tests is keeping the country’s infant mortality rate artificially low.
The BBC report that an estimated 1300 babies died from the coronavirus, almost twice that of the official data of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which estimates that just over 500 babies died.
Fatima Marinho, an epidemiologist and senior adviser to the non-governmental organization Vital Strategies, shared her research with the newspaper. She said a lack of testing keeps the true score lower than it really is.
Marinho found that there were ten times more deaths in children due to unexplained acute respiratory syndrome than reported in previous years, reports the BBC. She estimated that between February 2020 and March 15, 2021, the virus killed 2060 children under the age of 9, including 1,302 babies.
Conversely, the Brazilian Ministry of Health estimated that 852 children under the age of 9 died, including 518 babies.
Marinho told the BBC she had seen an increase in a condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome, a rare but serious condition that can cause inflammation of vital organs. The BBC has noted that the condition is not responsible for all the deaths that have occurred.
A study of more than 1,700 children and teenagers led by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the condition appeared between two to five weeks after the initial infection.
About 38 percent of the patients who were just 4 years old experienced low blood pressure or shock, and 44 percent were admitted to the intensive care unit.
Brazil was one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The country has recorded more than 13.6 million coronavirus infections since the pandemic began, just behind India and the US, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The country also reported more than 361,000 cumulative deaths, ranking only second in the US