Almost everybody had lost at least one close family member.
Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the city of Iquitos believed its remoteness would spare it from COVID-19 — instead, that same isolation became a death sentence when the pandemic arrived and the state did not. Researcher Japhy Wilson spent a year documenting the aftermath: a city where nearly every family buried someone, where oxygen was sold on black markets, and where the dead were sometimes not yet dead. The story of Iquitos is not merely a regional tragedy but a mirror held up to the enduring global failure to protect the most vulnerable when systems collapse.
- Iquitos entered the pandemic believing geographic isolation was a form of armor — it was, in fact, a trap that cut the city off from any meaningful government response.
- With no state intervention, families were forced into black markets for oxygen, paying desperate prices while bodies accumulated faster than the city could account for them.
- Researcher Japhy Wilson arrived in 2022 to find a city performing normalcy over a wound still open — the moment he began asking questions, years of suppressed grief broke through in nearly every conversation.
- The story of 'Uncle Covid' — a man pronounced dead, dumped in the jungle, who walked home three days later — circulated as collective myth, a symbol of how completely institutional order had dissolved.
- Five years on, Wilson's findings are published but the structural failures they expose remain largely unaddressed, leaving the world no better prepared for the next crisis of this kind.
When word of a spreading virus reached Iquitos in early 2020, residents took quiet comfort in their city's remoteness — accessible only by river or plane, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, it felt insulated from the world's dangers. That comfort proved catastrophic. Peru's first COVID wave arrived with brutal speed, and in Iquitos, the ordinary structures of survival simply ceased to function.
Unlike wealthier nations where governments mobilized resources and kept citizens afloat, Iquitos received no meaningful state intervention. Families scrambled to purchase oxygen on the black market at whatever price desperation would bear. The infrastructure of care had evaporated, leaving people to survive — or not — entirely on their own.
Japhy Wilson, a researcher at Bangor University who studies human-environment interactions, came to Iquitos in 2022 to document what had happened. He spent a year conducting interviews, and found a city still raw with grief. Almost every resident he spoke with had lost at least one close family member in that first wave. In decades of fieldwork in conflict zones and disaster areas, Wilson had never encountered so many people breaking into tears mid-conversation.
One story surfaced again and again: a man known locally as Uncle Covid had been brought to the hospital at the height of the crisis and pronounced dead. His sister was denied a final viewing. Three days later, he appeared at her door — filthy, disoriented, smelling of death — and told her he had woken in a pile of garbage bags dumped in the jungle and walked home. The story spread through the city as collective memory, a symbol of the chaos that had consumed it.
What struck Wilson most was how thoroughly the disaster had been buried beneath the surface of daily life. Iquitos looked normal when he arrived. But the silence was a shell — crack it, and the stories came flooding out. Five years later, his research is published, but the warning it carries goes largely unheeded. The systems that failed in the Amazon remain unchanged, and the world remains, in the ways that matter most, unprepared.
In early 2020, when news of a spreading virus began to reach Iquitos, a city deep in the Peruvian Amazon accessible only by river or plane, residents felt a strange kind of safety. Isolation, they believed, would be their shield. The jungle itself seemed like protection. They were wrong. Peru's first wave of COVID arrived with brutal speed, and Iquitos—cut off from the world in ways that should have mattered—became a place where the ordinary structures of survival simply ceased to exist.
What unfolded was not merely a health crisis but a collapse of the social order itself. In wealthier nations, governments mobilized resources, created safety nets, kept people afloat through the worst months. In Iquitos, there was no such intervention. People were abandoned to the market—and not the legitimate one. Families fought to buy oxygen on the black market, paying whatever price desperation demanded. To survive, residents had to take risks that should never have been necessary. The city became a place where the basic infrastructure of care had simply evaporated.
Japhy Wilson, a researcher at Bangor University in Wales who studies human-environment interactions, arrived in Iquitos in 2022 to document what had happened. He spent a year there, conducting interviews with residents about their memories of those first months. What he discovered was a city still haunted by what it had endured. Almost everyone he spoke with had lost at least one close family member during that initial wave. The grief was not historical—it was present, raw, immediate. In his decades of research in conflict zones and disaster areas, Wilson had never encountered so many people breaking down in tears while recounting their experiences.
One story emerged repeatedly in these conversations: the tale of Juan Pablo Vaquero, known locally as Uncle Covid. He had been brought to the main hospital during the height of the crisis and pronounced dead. His sister was not permitted to see his body. Three days later, he appeared at her doorstep, filthy and disoriented, reeking of death. When she asked what had happened, he told her he had awakened in a pile of black garbage bags dumped in the jungle and had somehow found his way home. The story was surreal, almost impossible to believe—and yet it circulated through the city as a kind of collective memory, a symbol of the chaos that had consumed the place.
What struck Wilson most was the deliberate forgetting. When he first arrived, everyday life appeared normal. The disaster seemed to have been erased from the present, tucked away into silence. But as soon as he began asking questions, the stories poured out—extraordinary, devastating, the kind of accounts that reveal what happens when a society is left entirely to its own devices in the face of catastrophe. The pandemic had exposed something fundamental about inequality and state capacity: those with resources and government support survived; those without did not.
Five years have passed since that first wave. Wilson's research has been published, his findings documented. Yet the warning embedded in Iquitos's experience remains largely unheeded. Few places have undertaken the kind of radical reckoning that would be necessary to prevent the same breakdown from happening again. The systems that failed in the Amazon remain largely unchanged. The next crisis, whenever it comes, will find most of the world unprepared in the ways that matter most.
Notable Quotes
I've done research in a lot of difficult, conflict situations in the past. But never had I encountered so many people breaking down in tears.— Japhy Wilson, researcher at Bangor University
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When you first arrived in Iquitos, did people immediately want to talk about what happened, or was there resistance?
There was this strange silence at first. Life looked normal on the surface. But the moment I started asking, it was like opening a door—everything came pouring out. It was as if people had been waiting for someone to ask.
The story of Uncle Covid—the man who was pronounced dead and found in garbage bags—that sounds almost mythological. Do you think it's literally true, or has it become something else?
I think it's both. Whether every detail happened exactly that way, I'm not sure. But what matters is that everyone knew this story, everyone repeated it. It became the way people made sense of the chaos—a kind of collective truth about what the breakdown looked like.
You mentioned nearly everyone lost a close family member. That's not a statistic—that's total saturation of grief.
Right. There's no distance from it. You can't compartmentalize it as something that happened to other people. It happened to everyone. That changes how a place remembers itself.
Why do you think the government simply didn't intervene the way governments did elsewhere?
Iquitos is remote, poor, and in the Amazon. It's not Lima. When the crisis hit, the state's capacity—or willingness—to reach that far simply wasn't there. And once the breakdown started, there was no mechanism to stop it.
What would it take now to actually prevent this from happening again?
That's the hard question. It would require rethinking how we distribute resources, how we build resilience in remote places, how we treat inequality as a public health issue. Five years later, I don't see that reckoning happening.