Mexico’s Undersecretary for Public Health and Promotion Hugo López-Gatell Martinez acts “with half-truths and reckless behavior,” political science professor Jose Antonio Aguilar Rivera told Patient Daily.
But Rivera doesn’t think López-Gatell Martinez is to blame for Mexico's response to COVID-19.
“The man responsible is not undersecretary Lopez Gatell, but the president [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] himself. He is a reckless gambler. If their projections are wrong the death toll will be enormous,” Rivera said. “Mexico avoided mass testing and relies solely on statistical models. The only confirmation of those models will be if the health system collapses or not in the coming months.”
Rivera earned a degree in international relations from El Colegio de Mexico and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He is a professor-researcher at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas(CIDE) in the division of political studies.
He wants the president and undersecretary to provide real information to the people of Mexico.
“Yes, they should get their act together and stop playing around with the numbers,” Rivera said. “They first provided an estimation of real infections and then they did not. As a result there is great uncertainty on the real dimension of the problem in Mexico.”
In Mexico 15,529 cases and 1,434 deaths from COVID-19 have been confirmed, according to the April 27 daily technical release by the government of Mexico. The document also states, “Currently there are suspicious cases under investigation in different entities of the republic.”
But critics of the government say they rely on software models to estimate the number of coronavirus cases without testing. The president and founder of Premio Nacional de Salud, Oscar David Hernández Carranza, said his organization estimates the nation had 176,800 COVID-19 cases as of April 22, more than 10 times the amount the government says.
Private hospitals continue to report they no longer have space for patients with coronavirus symptoms, El Norte reported. ABC Medical Center’s Covid Center does not have available beds. Médica Sur said it could not receive more patients in its COVID-19 intensive care unit.
Both hospitals continue to offer other services in other sections of their facilities.
Eleven hospitals in the metropolitan area reported Monday night that they could not accept more patients with the coronavirus, El Norte reported. These include the General Hospital of Mexico, the Children's Hospital of Mexico, Gea González, INER, the National Cardiology Department, the National Medical Sciences and Nutrition, Juárez and the National Medical Center La Raza.
José Luis Alomía, general director of epidemiology, said 71,103 patients have been studied so far and 46,960 have tested negative for the virus, El Norte reported.
Mexico City has the highest number of coronavirus cases, with 4,152, followed by the state of Mexico, with 2,444 patients.
