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As claimed on iacenter.org:

What’s behind this crisis is that during the past three years, the neoliberal regime of President Lenín Moreno privatized the public health system and systematically dismantled it. The system follows the U.S. “just in time,” profit-before-people industry model. Privatization has drastically reduced the number of intensive care units, hospital beds per person and the system’s overall capacity to handle a crisis.

Note that I'm not disputing that Ecuador has badly managed the Covid-19 crisis in some very obvious ways, like missing dead from the hospitals, insufficient testing leading to many more officially unexplained excess deaths compared to what's officially attributed to Covid-19, etc. I'm asking here if the number of ICU beds was substantially reduced in Moreno's time, due to the privatizations etc.

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  • 2
    Correlation might be easier to prove than causation. Would that be enough for you?
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Commented May 17, 2020 at 19:10
  • @Oddthinking: yes.
    – Believe it or not...
    Commented May 17, 2020 at 19:11

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If I'm reading the data correctly, this assertion is incorrect. According to Ecuador's official statistics, the number of intensive care beds increased from 857 in 2016 and 978 in 2017 up to 1,183 in 2018. Even taking population growth into account, this is a significant net increase in beds per person.

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  • OP states that the privatization happened during the last 3 years, so you should compare early 2017 (or late 2016) and 2020 data. IMHO 2018 is not recent enough
    – bradbury9
    Commented May 22, 2020 at 7:02
  • Unfortunately 2018 is the most recent available. Ill try to dig up 2017 though.
    – Brian Z
    Commented May 22, 2020 at 11:19

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