QUITO, Ecuador — Guayaquil, Ecuador’s business capital, has been the site of Latin America’s most aggressive outbreak of coronavirus, overwhelming its hospitals and burial system and causing bodies to be left in the streets.

Now, as authorities begin to grapple with the scale of the crisis, they have reason to believe that the toll for the province that includes Guayaquil is likely many times larger than the official government figure of 173 dead. The numbers are skewed because only those who test positive — dead or alive — are counted as coronavirus victims.

The usually bustling port city of about three million had about 1,500 more deaths in March than it did in the same month in 2019, Guayaquil’s mayor, Cynthia Viteri, said in an interview Monday.