Before traveling to Washington to meet Donald Trump earlier this month, the Mexican president had a coronavirus test.
Until then, Andrés Manuel López Obrador had never been examined, arguing that it was not necessary, despite the fact that several cabinet members had been infected with Covid-19.
The President, known as Amlo, performed a second test upon arrival in the United States; both results were negative.
But testing has been rare in Mexico, even for people with Covid-19 symptoms in the hospital and for the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who treat them.
“The WHO has said ‘test, test, test,’ but even health workers do not have access to the tests,” said Rafael Soto, a nurse and spokesperson for medical staff protesting improvements in medical care. “Many coworkers have died without being examined.”
Mexico performs only three tests for every 100,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins University board; 66.9% of results were positive on July 15, the last day of available data, according to Our World In Data.
Such a high positivity rate means that “a government is only testing the sickest patients seeking medical care and is not casting a wide enough network,” according to Johns Hopkins.
In comparison, the United States conducts 168 tests per 100,000 people
Exactly why Mexico refuses to test widely puzzles public health experts.
Some suspect that the country’s thrifty president sees the tests as superfluous spending: Amlo has repeatedly predicted that the pandemic will end sooner rather than later, and has used the crisis to push a package of deep cuts to government spending.
“It is a strategy based on the idea of maximum savings, and it is not producing results,” said Malaquías López-Cervantes, professor of public health at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam).
Others believe that the Mexican government is trying to copy the Swedish approach of minimizing blockades to limit the economic impact of the pandemic, something that López Obrador has cited as important in a country where more than half of the population works in the informal economy. .
“Mexico’s initial strategy was definitely to boost the herd’s immunity,” said Laurie Ann Ximénez-Fyvie, head of Unam’s molecular genetics laboratory. “Then they did everything they could to make it happen.”
However, as elsewhere, the strategy appears to have failed. The country has recorded more than 360,000 Covid-19 cases and more than 41,000 deaths. Its death toll recently exceeded that of Spain, France and Italy and is rapidly approaching that of the United Kingdom.
After a brief non-mandatory quarantine, Mexico has already begun to reopen its economy even though cases are still piling up and the death toll is accelerating to new records.
Mexico’s Tsar of the Coronavirus, Hugo López-Gatell, has strongly opposed widespread testing, calling it “a waste of time, effort, and resources.” He also acknowledged that less is being counted, but said it was not unusual during a pandemic.
Public health experts say the strategy has left Mexico flying blind. Instead of conducting tests, the country initially used mathematical models, based on samples from 475 clinics across the country.
López-Cervantes said the system did not provide information granular enough to make decisions locally. In May, the government announced an ambitious plan under which 324 “municipalities of hope” would be allowed to reopen, allegedly lacking coronavirus cases.
But an analysis of the thinktank Mexico, how are we doing? discovered that two thirds of the municipalities opened without performing a single test. Most municipalities subsequently suffered higher infection rates.
López-Cervantes predicted that, with Mexico’s continued opening of its overall economy, “it will get worse.” The most important difference [with Europe] is that they started returning to work when they had very few or no cases. Mexico began its reopening when it was in an ascending phase of the epidemic. “
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