BajaNomad - Mexico not widely testing for C-19 by choice

Mexico not widely testing for C-19 by choice

BajaNomad - 5-22-2020 at 06:58 PM

Per this interview with NBC news correspondent Richard Engel:

"It sounds like you're not testing by choice, as opposed to not testing because you can't do it?"

Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez: "True. Absolutely. Thank you for pointing that out. That's exact[ly the] answer."

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/mexico-city-param...

---
Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez is a Mexican epidemiologist, author, and infectious diseases expert, who has served as head of the Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion at the Mexican Secretariat of Health since 2018. Since January 2020, he has also played a major role as a spokesman and one of the lead members of the task force addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_L%C3%B3pez-Gatell_Ram%C3%...

JZ - 5-22-2020 at 09:03 PM

Not sure what to make of that.

SFandH - 5-23-2020 at 09:25 AM

It's not clear to me the Mexican official understood the question. It is a bit complicated for English as a second language individual.

Plus there are two types of COVID-19 tests. The test for the virus finds people who are contagious, the test for antibodies finds people who have been exposed to the virus in the past. The distinction wasn't made in the question.

But I can see where Mexico just doesn't have the resources to do testing on a meaningful scale.

So, if I get the test for the virus today to see if I'm contagious and it comes back negative, what does that tell me about tomorrow, next week?

[Edited on 5-23-2020 by SFandH]

Lee - 5-23-2020 at 11:07 AM

This MX official has no problem understanding English.

He admitted to not testing by choice and because they can't. He also stated it's impossible to count everyone (who might be infected).

Interviewing a ambulance EMT, NBC reporter Richard Engel is told hospitals are overwhelmed and turning patients away. Engel says it's possible the crematoriums will be the indicator for the number of deaths.

The ripple effect, I believe, of locking down DF will effect Baja. Normalization is looking far, far away.

BajaNomad - 5-23-2020 at 06:32 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Lee

The Mexico City doctor who is warning coronavirus cases could 'explode'.

(This video is both sad and disturbing at the reality that is playing out in DF.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKAm45Ilbok

BajaNomad - 5-23-2020 at 06:36 PM

While keeping the notation that testing widely isn't a priority... here are some stats being released...

Posted #'s from BCS this afternoon:
https://twitter.com/GobBCS/status/1264303064724336641

bcs c19 numbers EYu071cU8AAkxJ6.jpeg - 68kB

BajaNomad - 5-23-2020 at 06:43 PM

Baja California (BCN) numbers released a couple of hours ago:
https://twitter.com/BC_SSALUD/status/1264333513001598977

BajaNomad - 5-23-2020 at 07:02 PM

Coronavirus in Tijuana: Paramedics risk their lives to help the sick

(w/ impressive photojournalism)

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-21/on-the-f...

[Edited on 5-24-2020 by BajaNomad]

BajaNomad - 5-23-2020 at 07:04 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BajaNomad

(w/ impressive photojournalism)

https://www.instagram.com/yamphoto

[Edited on 5-24-2020 by BajaNomad]

Hook - 5-24-2020 at 06:43 AM

It IS possible to think that BOTH Trump and the Mexican government's responses are ludicrous. But Mexico's response trumps even Trump's, IMO.

Basically, Mexico has NO IDEA how widespread the virus is in Mexico. Amazingly, by choice.

But the morgues are filling up and the hospitals are seeing unprecedented deaths, according to news organizations INDEPENDENT of the government.

Like the cartel violence and the kidnappings, Mexico has a financial interest in downplaying anything that keeps tourist dollars away.

BajaNomad - 5-24-2020 at 09:57 PM

"I've never seen anything like this, not even during earthquakes"

- Benjamin, Crematorium worker in Mexico, D.F.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/mexico-s-coronavi...

Lee - 5-24-2020 at 10:57 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BajaNomad

"I've never seen anything like this, not even during earthquakes"

- Benjamin, Crematorium worker in Mexico, D.F.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/mexico-s-coronavi...

Mexicali leads Baja California in Covid-19 case #'s

BajaNomad - 5-30-2020 at 06:09 PM

Still keeping the topic of this thread in consideration - but sharing the #'s coming from the Baja California (BCN) department of health...

Mexicali now has the most confirmed cases in the northern state of B.C.

https://twitter.com/BC_SSALUD/status/1266493299000369154

https://kyma.com/news/2020/05/29/mexicali-leads-baja-califor...

[Edited on 5-31-2020 by BajaNomad]

BajaNomad - 5-30-2020 at 06:12 PM

And the most recent #'s from BCS officials...

https://twitter.com/GobBCS/status/1266839413931343876

[Edited on 5-31-2020 by BajaNomad]

I'm over this. I hugged my neighbor today, and I liked it.

Feathers - 5-30-2020 at 06:24 PM

Wake me up when the Anti-body testing has been properly calculated.

[Edited on 5-31-2020 by Feathers]

mtgoat666 - 5-30-2020 at 09:23 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Lee

Quote: Originally posted by BajaNomad

"I've never seen anything like this, not even during earthquakes"

- Benjamin, Crematorium worker in Mexico, D.F.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/mexico-s-coronavi...

Smells like pork on the barbecue!

KasloKid - 5-30-2020 at 09:39 PM

Quote: Originally posted by mtgoat666

Quote: Originally posted by Lee

Quote: Originally posted by BajaNomad

"I've never seen anything like this, not even during earthquakes"

- Benjamin, Crematorium worker in Mexico, D.F.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/mexico-s-coronavi...

Smells like pork on the barbecue!

Goat...That is the most disgusting and revolting comment I have ever read on this forum.

Feathers - 5-31-2020 at 06:41 PM

Quote: Originally posted by KasloKid

Goat...That is the most disgusting and revolting comment I have ever read on this forum.

You haven't been paying attention.

Thread Change? BajaNomad 'DOUG' IS A LYING POS!

Feathers - 5-31-2020 at 07:06 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Feathers

Quote: Originally posted by KasloKid

Goat...That is the most disgusting and revolting comment I have ever read on this forum.

You haven't been paying attention.

What A JOKE!

Goodbye LIAR!

Feathers - 5-31-2020 at 07:09 PM

[Edited on 6-1-2020 by Feathers]

[Edited on 6-1-2020 by Feathers]

BajaNomad - 5-31-2020 at 07:32 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Feathers

Goodbye LIAR!

Duplicate, ya think?

Feathers - 5-31-2020 at 07:44 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BajaNomad

Quote: Originally posted by Feathers

Goodbye LIAR!

Feathers - 5-31-2020 at 07:54 PM

Look at Lencho and BahaNomad's Tag lines. A Coincidence?

elgatoloco - 6-1-2020 at 07:32 AM

Quote: Originally posted by Feathers

Look at Lencho and BahaNomad's Tag lines. A Coincidence?

Thought you left already? Liar!

Half of All Covid Tests Are Positive in Mexico, Highest in the World

BajaNomad - 7-1-2020 at 11:27 AM

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By Sebastian Boyd and Andrea Navarro
July 1, 2020

As nations around the world try to get their economies humming again, the number of coronavirus tests coming back positive has turned into the metric to watch. Five percent is the threshold to reopen safely. Ten percent is troubling, twenty percent outrageous.

In Mexico, it stands at 50%.

The sky-high results are easy to explain -- though not so easy to fix. The Latin American nation has stubbornly shunned wide-scale testing and instead runs exams only on the sickest of patients. Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez Gatell in late May said anything more would be “a waste of time, effort and resources.”

Throughout the pandemic, Mexico and parts of Latin America have reported positivity rates that dwarf anything seen from China to the U.S., including new trouble spots like Arizona and Texas. With half of all tests coming back positive, Mexico ties only Bolivia for title of the world’s highest rate. In Argentina and Chile, almost 3 out of every 10 exams lead to a Covid-19 diagnosis. And in Brazil, where 1.4 million people have been infected, no one knows for sure because the government doesn’t release that data.

“You don’t want it to be that easy to find cases,” said Amesh A. Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They’re not trying hard enough.”

When rates are that high, it means governments don’t have a handle on how bad the outbreak is within their borders. In the U.S., where the positivity rate is creeping back up and stands at 8%, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the true scale of the pandemic may be 10 times what tests show.

Officially, Mexico reported more than 226,000 cases as of Tuesday and 27,769 deaths. Latin America has more than 2.5 million cases and accounts for about half of all new daily deaths globally.

What troubles many health professionals is that neither Mexico nor Brazil, Latin America’s powerhouses by economic might and population, have shown much willingness or ability to change the trend. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro, who advocates jobs over lock-downs, mingled with large crowds of supporters last weekend, even picking up a little girl for photos. (Neither one wore a mask.) And Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently wrapped up a weeks-long tour across Mexico.

“Our purpose is not to count every case, but to use modern and efficient mechanisms to tackle the pandemic,” Lopez Gatell said in a Senate hearing in late May. On Tuesday, he said, “deaths in our country are associated with diabetes, hypertension and obesity.”

To be fair, in a region where more than a third of the population lives in poverty, most Latin American nations can’t afford to shut down fully or pass big stimulus packages to offset the fallout. Heading into the pandemic, the U.S. was capping its biggest economic boom ever while Latin America was mostly going backward. Argentina and Ecuador were mired in debt crises. Mexico had slipped into recession, while Brazil in 2019 logged its fourth straight year of unemployment above 10%. And then there’s Venezuela, whose collapse has sent a diaspora of millions across its borders.

There are signs the positivity rate may be falling in Chile, where the health ministry wants to get the level down to 10%. And Brazil’s Health Ministry last week launched a plan to test more than 20% of the population of 210 million people by year-end, although half of the exams will be so-called quick antibody tests, whose reliability is under debate in the medical community.

The World Health Organization recommends that countries should achieve test positivity rates at 5% or lower for 14 days before reopening.

“You need to be testing the mild cases,” Adalja said. “Those cases you’re missing are out there infecting people.”
--

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-01/half-of-a...

Unfair, Sensationalist Headline

SFandH - 7-1-2020 at 11:37 AM

That headline is really misleading since Mexico largely tests only sick people while other countries test as many people as they can, sick or not. Comparing apples and oranges.

"The sky-high results are easy to explain -- though not so easy to fix. The Latin American nation has stubbornly shunned wide-scale testing and instead runs exams only on the sickest of patients."

Sensationalism sells. Don't believe everything you read.

[Edited on 7-1-2020 by SFandH]

pacificobob - 7-1-2020 at 05:47 PM

Quote: Originally posted by SFandH

That headline is really misleading since Mexico largely tests only sick people while other countries test as many people as they can, sick or not. Comparing apples and oranges.

"The sky-high results are easy to explain -- though not so easy to fix. The Latin American nation has stubbornly shunned wide-scale testing and instead runs exams only on the sickest of patients."

Sensationalism sells. Don't believe everything you read.

[Edited on 7-1-2020 by SFandH]

almost sounds like the authors had agenda.

SFandH - 7-1-2020 at 05:49 PM

clickbait

mtgoat666 - 7-1-2020 at 06:13 PM

Well,... trump directed his people to test less, to improve statistics

Mexico Deaths Point to Cases in the Millions

BajaNomad - 7-31-2020 at 10:02 AM

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By Andrea Navarro
July 29, 2020

In a day or two, Mexico will overtake the U.K. as the hot spot with the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths globally. In a nation with relatively low reported infections, that’s a major red flag.

Based on official tallies, one out of every nine people diagnosed with the disease in Mexico dies. According to Amesh A. Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, that would mean either the virus is far deadlier in Mexico than elsewhere -- and there’s no reason to think that’s the case -- or the reported number of infections is a gross undercount.

With the data available worldwide, as imperfect as it may be, Adalja says it’s fair to estimate an average mortality rate of 0.6% for the disease. Applying that ratio to Mexico’s fatality figures, the actual case count may be closer to 7.1 million. Although many of those would likely be mild or asymptomatic, they could still be contagious, he said.

Mexico’s deaths from the virus totals 44,876, half that of Brazil’s, which has over six times as many cases. Mexican infections stand at just 402,697 versus 2.48 million in Brazil.

“The outbreak is out of control,” Adalja said. “If you’re not testing, tracing, isolating, you’re going to have chains of transmission that land on vulnerable people and you’re going to have high hospitalizations and deaths.”

Latin America has 4.44 million people who have caught the virus across the region. The U.S., which has also struggled with its Covid response, leads the world with 4.36 million cases.

What’s more, excess death rates in Mexico show that even the mortality figures may be an undercount. An analysis across 20 of Mexico’s 32 states found that 71,315 extra deaths occurred from March 15 to June 27, 55% higher than expected based on previous years data, according to a study presented over the weekend by health authorities. Some 22,400 of those were tallied as Covid-19 deaths.

While many of the excess deaths may have been caused by the coronavirus, overrun hospitals and patients delaying treatment out of fear of getting sick likely also contributed to more people dying than usual. Similar studies around the world have come to conclusions akin to those results.

But in Mexico, health authorities have also openly acknowledged they’re not testing anywhere close to what global health officials recommend -- nor do they plan to. The Latin American nation has foregone wide-scale testing and instead runs exams only on the sickest of patients. Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez Gatell in late May said anything more would be “a waste of time, effort and resources.”

Of the few tests that are carried out, many take as long as a month to be processed at inundated labs, according to a report by news website Animal Politico.

“There’s no public health action that can be taken with a month-old test,” Adalja said. “The person is not going to sit at home for a month waiting for a test.”
--

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/mexico-de...

RFClark - 7-31-2020 at 12:52 PM

Consider the source!

Mexico flying blind as lack of Covid-19 testing mystifies experts

BajaNomad - 8-4-2020 at 01:10 PM

--
24 Jul 2020

Before travelling to Washington to meet Donald Trump earlier this month, the Mexican president took a coronavirus test.

Until then, Andrés Manuel López Obrador had never been tested, arguing that there was no need for it – even though several cabinet members had become infected with Covid-19.

The president, known as Amlo, took a second test on arriving in the US; both results were negative.

But testing has been rare in Mexico, even for people presenting Covid-19 symptoms at hospital and for the physicians, nurses and paramedics treating them.

“The WHO has said ‘test, test, test’ – but not even healthcare workers have access to tests,” said Rafael Soto, a nurse and spokesman for medical personnel protesting for healthcare improvements. “Many co-workers have died without ever having been tested.”

Mexico has performed just three tests per 100,000 people on a daily basis since the pandemic started, according to Johns Hopkins University’s dashboard; 66.9% of the results were positive on 15 July, the last day data was available, according to Our World In Data.

Such a high positivity rate means “a government is only testing the sickest patients who seek out medical attention and not casting a wide enough net”, according to Johns Hopkins.

By comparison, the United States performs 168 tests per 100,000 people

Exactly why Mexico refuses to test widely mystifies public health experts.

Some suspect the country’s thrifty president sees testing as a superfluous expense: Amlo has repeatedly predicted that the pandemic will end sooner rather than later, and has used the crisis to push through a package of deep cuts to government spending.

“It’s a strategy based on the idea of maximum savings – and it’s not producing results,” said Malaquías López-Cervantes, a public health professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam).

Others believe Mexico’s government is attempting to copy the Swedish approach of minimizing lockdowns to limit the pandemic’s economic impact – something López Obrador has cited as important in a country where more than half the population work in the informal economy.

“The initial strategy of Mexico was definitely shooting for herd immunity,” said Laurie Ann Ximénez-Fyvie, head of the Unam molecular genetics laboratory. “Then they did everything possible to achieve that.”

As elsewhere, however, the strategy seems to have failed. The country has registered more than 360,000 Covid-19 cases and more than 41,000 fatalities. Its death toll recently passed those in Spain, France and Italy and it is fast approaching that of the United Kingdom.

After a short, non-obligatory quarantine, Mexico has already started to reopen its economy even though cases are still accumulating and the death toll racing to new records.

Mexico’s coronavirus tsar, Hugo López-Gatell, has steadfastly opposed widespread testing, calling it “a waste of time, effort and resources”. He also has acknowledged undercounting is occurring, but has said that was not unusual during a pandemic.

Public health experts say the strategy has left Mexico flying blind. Instead of testing, the country initially employed mathematical modeling, based on samples from 475 clinics around the country.

López-Cervantes said that system did not provide information which was granular enough to make decisions at a local level. In May, the government announced an ambitious plan under which 324 “municipalities of hope” – which supposedly lacked coronavirus cases – would be allowed to reopen.

But an analysis by the thinktank México ¿Cómo Vamos? found that two-thirds of the municipalities opened without performing a single test. Most of the municipalities subsequently suffered increased rates of infection.

López-Cervantes predicted that, with Mexico’s ongoing opening of its wider economy, “it’s going to get worse. The most important difference [with Europe] is they began to return to work when they had very few or no cases. Mexico started its reopening when it was in an ascending phase of the epidemic.”
--

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/24/m...