Last winter the carnage in Mexico City was palpable. Black smoke billowed around the clock from overwhelmed cemetery crematoriums. Funereal bottlenecks forced families to take the remains of their loved ones to other parts of the country for timely disposal. In hospitals the bodies were backlogged on gurneys and in autopsy rooms. It took until May for Mexico’s hospitalizations to drop to 13% of capacity, from 90% in January, and the positivity rate, once the world’s highest at roughly 50%, to fall to 17%. “Many patients didn’t have a chance to even make it to a hospital or wound up in a hospital that wasn’t prepared,” says Francisco Moreno, head of internal medicine at Centro Médico ABC, one of Mexico’s most prestigious private medical institutions. “What I saw was a total collapse of the health system.
”And yet, to the world and even some Mexicans, it’s almost as if it never happened. If you didn’t know that an extraordinary number of people had perished only months ago, it would be easy to see just another sunny summer on the horizon, with bustling boulevards and packed beaches. Some of this collective amnesia is due in part to the actions AMLO never took: While Europe is publicly wrestling with how to reopen to foreign tourism, Mexico never closed air travel from any countries or required any testing or quarantines from visitors. But the forgetting doesn’t mean it didn’t happen—or can’t happen again, soon. Mexico’s first mistake, and probably its biggest, was its coronavirus testing plan. As part of its initial pandemic response in March 2020, AMLO’s government didn’t offer tests unless a patient had symptoms.
The method’s power to obscure was the envy of then-U.S. President Donald Trump. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting,” Trump groused to top aides last summer Mexico’s strategy, which has never officially changed, both failed to keep the virus’s spread in check and meant the country’s death toll escaped wide notice. When researchers tried to put together more accurate numbers, the government erected barriers. Some researchers had been able to cobble together a rough count of excess deaths in Mexico City based on death certificates, having noticed they were sequentially numbered. The idea was, if you know the latest number on the certificates, you know how many are dead. In March the authorities thwarted that workaround: The certificates were no longer searchable by number, only by name. There are no longer independently available statistics on excess mortality.
Mexico’s second big mistake was AMLO’s refusal to raise debt to pay for fiscal stimulus or aid to the poor, as the leaders of most major economies did. This reflected the economic quirks of the president himself, who’s never possessed a credit card in his name. The son of fabric shop owners from the state of Tabasco, AMLO has shunned luxuries and refused to fly on the presidential Boeing 787 Dreamliner—he’s been trying to sell it from his first day in office. His political philosophy was shaped by the disastrous debt default of 1982, which brought inflation to 115%, and the Tequila Crisis of 1994, which produced a sudden devaluation of the peso and a recession. Mexico was on the cusp of hope on Christmas Eve. On the holiday known as Nochebuena, or the Good Night, it became the first nation in Latin America to administer a Covid vaccine.
Aishwarya Says:
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