Buried alive? The surreal story of how COVID took over a remote city in the Amazon [Video]

Juan Pablo Vaquero was pronounced dead in the Peruvian Amazonian city of Iquitos in the first wave of COVID-19 in April 2020. His sister wasn’t allowed to see his body. Three days later he appeared at her home, after having allegedly awoken in a pile of corpses in the jungle.

Uncle Covid, as Vaquero came to be known, became a local media sensation. His story was dismissed as an urban myth by the political and professional elites of the city. But it struck a chord with an impoverished majority trapped in an unprecedented crisis.

As my new research on the pandemic in Iquitos shows, the first wave hit the city hard. Around 70% of its inhabitants had been infected by July 2020. The region of Loreto – of which Iquitos is the capital – had the highest death rate in Peru, which had the highest death rate in the world.

I had been in Iquitos…