Latin America's pandemic death toll has served past 100,000 Aquino Johns Hopkins University.

Brazil, Peru, Chile and Mexico are the hardest set by far.

Eight hours down river from the nearest hospital, Peru's central Amazon is struggling.

Meanwhile, the virus is relatively under control in places like Belize or Aguay and Paraguay,

but there's a lot more bad news than good.

Just last month, Latin America was declared an epicenter of this coronavirus pandemic,

and now several countries in the region are seeing record-high cases and fatality rates.

Brazil, they have the second highest number of total coronavirus cases after the United States,

Mexico, Ecuador, Chile. They have some of the highest mortality rates in the world relative to their populations.

My colleague, Dr. Elmar Huerta, an oncologist, has been covering this story for months.

He's the senior medical writer for CNN Esponial, and he also hosts our Spanish language coronavirus podcast.

So today, I sat down to talk to him about the wide-ranging ways Latin American countries have handled this pandemic,

and why the region came to be hit so hard by COVID-19.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

I've been looking forward to this very much speaking to you.

You've also been covering coronavirus in a podcast.

How has that been for you? How did that come about, and why was that important to you?

There is so much misinformation. There are all these conspiracy theories.

So what I tried to do in my podcast and my reports for CNN and Spanish and the radio programs I have,

is that I give both sides. Because as a public health practitioner, I try to, for people to understand,

that public health is a very, very, very broad specialty, which includes politics, a lot of politics,

that includes economy, but also includes other disciplines in sciences, and even the arts and humanities,

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