INTRODUCTION One year after WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we found it useful to carry out a diagnosis of the situation in Latin America.

OBJECTIVES Examine the prevailing epidemiological panorama in mid-March 2021 in 16 countries in Latin America and the performance, over time, in the two countries with the best responses to their respective epidemics.

METHODS Using morbidity and mortality data, we compared the relative performance of each country under review and identified the two countries with the most successful responses to the pandemic. We used five indicators to analyze the course of each country’s performance during the pandemic throughout 2020: prevalence of active cases per million population; cumulative incidence rate in 7 days per 100,000 population; positivity rate over a 7-day period; percentage of recovered patients and crude mortality rate per 1,000,000 population.

RESULTS According to the performance indicators, Cuba was ranked highest, followed by Uruguay. Although figures remained within acceptable margins, both nations experienced notable setbacks in the first weeks of 2021, especially sharp in Uruguay.

CONCLUSIONS Any characterization of the situation is condemned to be short-lived due to the emergence of mutational variants; however, this analysis identified favorable sociodemographic characteristics in both nations, and in their health systems, which may offer possible explanations for the results we obtained.