RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The undersecretary of Health of Mexico and strategist against the coronavirus pandemic, Hugo Lopez-Gatell, warned on Thursday, March 25th, about the possibility of a third epidemic wave of Covid-19 in his country, the day it surpassed the mark of 200,000 deaths linked to the disease.
Faced with such a scenario, the senior official said that the Mexican government, headed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took the decision to postone the vaccination of teachers, and rather to concentrate on immunizing the six territorial entities in the center of the country.
“For the moment we will not continue advancing in the vaccination of teachers and we will postpone the intention of opening the educational system due to an important technical reflection, the possibility of having a third epidemic wave,” said López-Gatell in a press conference.
He pointed out that the warning is given when the country “has had six weeks of reduction of the epidemic and not when it is resurging”.
Currently, the number of estimated active cases in Mexico is 34,959, that is, 1% of the total number of sick people who have presented symptoms in the last two weeks.
Increase of cases in different countries
López-Gatell explained that for the Mexican government “a fundamental sign” is the fact that in some countries, especially in the southern hemisphere of Latin America, but also in Europe, “there is a resurgence of the epidemic”, and cited countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, where infections have increased in the last weeks.
He recalled that the epidemics in the different countries “do not occur at the same time and are not synchronized”, although he highlighted the North American region with Canada, the United States, and Mexico which, he said, “has had a certain degree of synchrony, but with different intensities.”
The Mexican strategist pointed out that in view of these signals, the Mexican authorities decided to modify the coverage of educational personnel and redirect it to the care of the population in urban areas “and a fundamental one is the megalopolis which is made up of Mexico City and the states of Hidalgo, Puebla, Morelos, Querétaro, Tlaxcala and the State of Mexico”.
“For pandemic purposes, it is as if it were a single entity, so we are going to concentrate efforts to cover this region which has the highest population density and the greatest risk that it could be the center of the emergence of a third wave,” he said.
“If the third wave does not occur, excellent, but we have to be prepared,” he said.
Mexico is deploying the vaccination program that for now contemplates adults over 60 years of age, medical personnel, and educational personnel.
On Thursday, March 25th, Mexico reported 584 new deaths due to covid-19 in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic to 200,211, according to data from the Ministry of Health. In addition, the country added 5,787 new cases of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus for a total of 2,214,542 infections.
With these figures, Mexico ranks thirteenth in the world in the number of infections and third in the number of deaths attributed to the pandemic, behind the United States and Brazil, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Source: EFE