On a quiet street in Lima, very close to the sea, the portraits of the 551 Peruvian doctors killed by the covid-19 pandemic, which has hit the country hard, are displayed.

A three-meter-high marble obelisk was also built on this street in the tourist district of Miraflores, south of the Peruvian capital, in order to perpetuate the memory of the doctors who lost their lives treating coronavirus patients , two of them in the last month.

The 551 portraits, with name, date, and region where they worked, occupy about 200 meters in length on the front of the national headquarters of the Medical College of Peru, a three-story yellow house. They are mostly men, but there are also women. Some were old, others quite young.

It is the so-called "Paseo de los Héroes", as block seven of the Malecón de la Reserva, which passes in front of the headquarters of the medical union, was renamed.

"The doctors who are here are heroes in white coats [...], because they have offered their lives to save lives and they, without masks, without the conditions, have faced the pandemic," the head of the College, Raúl Urquizo told AFP

With more than 201,000 deaths, the Andean country of 33 million inhabitants has the highest death rate from the pandemic in the world: 6,111 per million inhabitants, according to an AFP balance based on official figures. In total, more than two million people were infected.

The 551 deaths from the pandemic correspond to 6% of doctors in Peru, a figure higher than that of neighboring countries such as Colombia (131) or Chile (19),

according to data from the Latin Ibero-American Medical Confederation. Although 891 doctors died in Brazil, its population is seven times that of Peru.