OSRS gold shut down all schools, closed the frontiers between Venezuela and neighboring countries, and placed six states and Caracas within quarantine. Marinez was stuck in transit and holed up at his uncle's home in a city a little more than 50 miles of the capital.

After two months, Marinez came back to Maracaibo, "without any money in my pockets," he said. He tried to find work but could not find the market for jobs destroyed by the pandemic, and a long-running economic downturn.

Ten years before, Venezuela, a petrostate under the presidency of Hugo Chavez, witnessed a slump in the price of oil. The price for a barrel plunged up to nearly $50 from a high of over $100 while it was the year that U.S. instituted wide-ranging sanctions against the authoritarian Venezuelan government.

"When prices for oil began to fall in the early buy OSRS GP, there was not enough cash to purchase goods from abroad," said Alejandro Velasco professor at New York University who specializes in Venezuelan political issues, in an interview over the phone. "As a result that there was not enough funds to support the economy."