Experts Puzzled By Why Haiti Has One of the Lowest COVID-19 Death Rates In the World Despite Administering Zero Vaccine Doses: ‘We Don’t Know’

For months, health experts have tried to pinpoint the reason for Haiti’s inexplicitly low COVID-19 death rate as other countries continue to struggle to contain exploding numbers of cases and deaths. In India, a global hotspot for the virus, the seven-day average for cases has reached 385,000, while deaths have routinely topped 3,000 a day in the nation of nearly 1.4 billion people.

In Haiti, a country with a population of more than 11 million, there have been 13,164 cases throughout the entire pandemic, and 264 deaths. The Caribbean nation has one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world, at just 22 per million. In Delhi, that number reached 892 in April before the outbreak continued to accelerate. In the United States, that figure stands at 1,800 per million, and at nearly 3,000 per million in some places in Europe.

Dr. Jean “Bill” Pape, a top Haitian infectious disease expert, said the nation’s low death rate can’t be attributed to strict adherence to mask-wearing or social distancing guidelines.

“Most people don’t wear a mask,” he said.

By December, most restrictions had been lifted and buses and markets have been crowded in recent months. No one in Haiti has received a single dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

When COVAX, a program run by the World Health Organization, offered Haiti AstraZeneca vaccines, the government declined the offer.

“Because COVID did not impact us as badly, people don’t think it [the vaccine] is worth it actually,” Dr. Jacqueline Gautier, a member of Haiti’s advisory group on COVID vaccinations, told NPR.