And as that story shows, the fear of COVID is real and far reaching - and that "abundance of caution" dictates almost every move by public officials in Belize.
But, not so in the US. In many states, that caution has been thrown to the wind, and many businesses, beaches and bars have re-opened, despite still rising COVID cases in more than 21 states.
121 thousand Americans have died, and some projections say that by September, that figure could be a shocking two hundred thousand dead. It's a staggering figure, and, yesterday, we asked the US Chargé d'Affaires how that scale of loss messes with the American national psyche:
Jules Vasquez
"Just from a sociopolitical perspective insofar as how does that affect the American mind to think that 200,00 people, three times the number of people that died in Vietnam will die of this CVOVID-19, if that projection is correct."
Keith R. Gilges, Chargé d'Affaires
"Sure, you know, 200,000 people is a shocking number, but I think what happens is it's a number, and the number's gone up, and what happens is that just means there are two hundred thousand families that are dealing with this personally in that moment. You, know I think we are at 120,000 deaths right now. so, each one of those, each piece of that statistic was a person, and had an impact on their families, their spouses, their children, their parents, whomever. And so it becomes such a personal tragedy. I have lost friends to COVID, a dear friend of 25 years is one of the first people to die of COVID in Washington DC at age 66. You know, so it's touched so many people, and it's always difficult to say a number is shocking but what's really tough is when it hits you personally."
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