Politics: The potential cost of Covid-19 inaction
It has been just over a week since the first confirmed case in Mexico of Covid-19 was reported, followed in short order by five more, and the detection of 26 people suspected of carrying the virus. No one has died of the disease to date, and all confirmed cases were contracted while outside the country, specifically in Italy.
Given the accelerated spread that has occurred in a number of other countries that initially reported such a limited sample, one might expect the government to take a very hands-on approach. However, so far, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has insisted that there is no cause for concern, and everything is under control, while labeling Mexico’s robust response to the 2009 outbreak of AH1N1 influenza as an overreaction.
As long as the number of serious cases never manages to surpass a significant threshold, there is always a possibility that Mexico will go largely unscathed. But in the absence of any major containment measures – there are not even sanitary filters in airports – and with the rest of the country carrying on with business as usual, there remains a latent risk that the number of cases could start accelerating just as we have seen in some East Asian countries other than China, the Middle East and Europe where the authorities were slow to act.
Such a scenario would be especially troubling for Mexico at a time when much of the country’s public health system is being radically restructured as part of the president’s objective to provide free medical care to the entire population with the creation of the Health Institute for Wellbeing (Insabi). Hamstrung by interruptions in the flow of medicines to clinics and hospitals, as well as by a lack of coordination and confusion as to how things should operate while the new institute is devised, the health system seems unprepared to handle such a contingency, and AMLO and his administration risk paying a big political price ahead of the 2021 midterms.
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