They’re just introducing the population size of the cou try, for comparison with the number of people affected. Saying “a country of over 34 million people” is a quick way to do that, though it could’ve been rephrased as “Peru - which has a popularion of over 34 million people -” or something.
Point is, it’s just an incidental redundancy in the way they phrased their delivery of the population number, I think, not an attempt to tell people “Peru is a country.”