Experts Doubt Mexican Government’s Claims on Falling Curve

(Bloomberg) --

Mexico’s government plans to reopen parts of the economy as soon as next week, even as researchers and health officials cast doubts on its claim the contagion curve is flattening.

Mexico reported a record 2,437 new cases Friday along with 290 more deaths, while several of the capital’s hospitals approached capacity. Still, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez Gatell said there are signs the rate of contagion has begun to slow as the country comes under increasing international pressure to reopen global supply chains.

A former health official and a group of Mexican researchers say the fresh numbers suggest the curve is still on an upward trajectory. With one of the lowest coronavirus testing rates in the region, hospitalizations in Mexico may well be the better bellwether for gauging the scope of the pandemic and when it’s safe to reopen. Those numbers are grim.

In the nation’s capital, at least 76% of all hospital beds are occupied, and 63% of ventilators are in use, Lopez Gatell said Friday. That’s up from 58% on April 29. More than a quarter of all coronavirus cases are concentrated in Mexico City.

“We can’t say the curve is falling or even that it’s reaching a plateau,” said Alejandro Macias, Mexico’s influenza czar during the 2009 outbreak. “We’d need weeks of falling numbers to be able to say that. It’s fine to make plans to reopen, but we need to wait longer to be able to say we’ve reached the peak.”

Public health officials and organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say economies shouldn’t start to reopen until there is a decline in overall cases or positive tests within a 14-day period.

Saturated hospitals in Mexico City are turning people away, Reforma newspaper reported Wednesday, with ambulances and private cars arriving at emergency rooms only to be redirected elsewhere. As of Friday, 16 hospitals in the metropolitan area had “critical” capacity, 25 reported “good” and 32 reported occupancy somewhere between 50% and 89%, without specifying, according to the city’s data.

“From what we’ve seen in Mexico City, there’s significant saturation in hospitals,” said Fernando Alarid, a member of a group of researchers at Mexico’s Center for Research & Teaching in Economics (CIDE) and Stanford University, which have been working on Covid-19 models for some Mexican states. “And as soon as you relax mitigation efforts while there are still a high number of new cases, you’ll see an increase in cases, a new wave.”

The group’s mathematical and epidemiological model predicts a peak in Mexico City’s cases on June 21, but only if social distancing practices are maintained until the end of this month. In that scenario, Mexico would see 28,757 new cases that day, and accumulated cases would reach 680,008.

“I imagine authorities are taking into account other economic and social consequences into their decision-making process,” Alarid said. “We only look at cases.”

Mexico celebrated Mother’s Day on May 10, and while authorities begged citizens not to go visit their moms, Mexico City’s Health Minister Oliva Lopez said some areas of the city reported lines of people waiting to buy food, flowers and cakes. “We’ll see the impact of these outings in the coming days,” she said in an interview with W Radio.

The country’s confirmed Covid-19 cases reached 45,032 on Friday, the Health Ministry said. Deaths rose to 4,767. There are an additional 16,450 cases from private laboratories that have not been added to the official tally, Lopez Gatell said, because the tests don’t have names of patients and the government doesn’t want to risk double counting.

Mexico isn’t allowing serology testing for antibodies to the virus at one top private hospital, the ABC Medical Center. These limits on testing, both to see how many people are currently infected and how many have already recovered, is hampering doctors’ ability to monitor the outbreak, said Francisco Moreno, head of internal medicine at the hospital.

“The reality is that no one knows the reality,” Moreno said. “If you’re not testing, you don’t know when you’re reaching the maximum point of contagion, you don’t know how long that would last, and you don’t know when that number will start falling, to determine when you’re ready to open the market.”

May 18 Reopening

Mexico’s auto, construction and mining sectors will resume some activities starting Monday, and production can ramp up as soon as safety measures are in place, according to a Health Ministry decree. Also starting May 18, schools and businesses will begin reopening in stages and will start in areas of the country with no reported virus cases. Areas with higher cases will return at the start of June.

U.S. carmakers see Mexico’s production of autos and parts as especially crucial for them to resume their own manufacturing. In Mexico, gross domestic product is expected to drop 7.5% this year, according to the latest survey of economists by Citibanamex.

The reopening “will be done in an extremely careful way. We have to return to a certain normalcy,” Lopez Gatell said Tuesday. “We need to reactivate social and economic life, and take away the enormous pressure on people who live day by day. We have to be aware of the potential risk of a resurgence in cases.”

Mexico lost 555,247 jobs in April amid the nationwide shutdown to stop the spread of the virus, the worst monthly drop on record.

But in the U.S., the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci also warned that reopening the country too soon could lead to needless suffering and death.

“There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control,” Fauci said at a Senate Health Committee hearing Tuesday. “In fact, paradoxically it will set you back -- not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided but it could even set you back on the road on trying to get economic recovery.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.