Mexico ramps up vaccinations as COVID deaths top 200,000

Mexico has surpassed 200,000 test-confirmed deaths from COVID-19, as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called vaccination efforts a race against time.

The president prepared to deploy more military, state and local personnel to spur the vaccination effort as more doses arrive, including a shipment of 1.7 million AstraZeneca shots the United States has “loaned” Mexico.

Mexico’s total 200,211 confirmed COVID-19 deaths announced on Thursday trail only the US and Brazil, countries with larger populations. The real death toll is believed to be drawing closer to 300,000, due to the country’s extremely low rate of testing.

“I think it is more. I think, for example, that the numbers on the news are not correct, I think it is higher,” funeral home worker Benigno Clemente Zarate said of the death toll.

Zarate told The Associated Press he has tended to multiple deaths in a single household.

“We have had some jobs where two or three people have died in the same household, in the same family,” he said.

The Mexican government stopped publishing numbers on excess deaths at the end of 2020. The last time the numbers were reported was at the start of January, before the worst of the second wave of deaths hit.

But authorities in Mexico City have published excess death figures through the end of February, and they show that January’s deaths were almost 46 percent higher than in the city’s first wave in June.

Mexico’s health department acknowledges almost 220,000 “estimated” COVID-19 deaths as of mid-March, but that estimate is not based on excess death reports and probably does not include the considerable number of people who die at home in Mexico.

Mexico City was among the hardest-hit cities in the world. Mexico City’s nine million inhabitants suffered 38,627 deaths; with only 7.1 percent of the country’s population, the capital has had 19.3 percent of the country’s total deaths.

While large, closely packed cities with intensive mass transit systems may have suffered more across the globe, Mexico City also has far better healthcare facilities than the rest of the country. Still, the capital saw about 430 confirmed COVID-19 deaths per 100,000.

The human toll is overwhelming.

Patricia Silva Caudillo, 46, went to a dusty cemetery on the eastern edge of the city to bury her husband, construction worker Pedro Capilla, 51.

Capilla, a diabetic, was getting dialysis treatment at a local hospital where he was apparently infected with COVID-19.

“He was everything to me,” said Silva Caudillo. “He was my companion, my support.”

Raquel Diaz also came to the cemetery to bury a relative. “This has left a lot of pain, a lot of tragedy, it has left so many people orphaned or widowed,” Diaz said. “I don’t think this pandemic has brought anything good.”

Lopez Obrador said on Thursday he views it as a race against time to get all people aged over 60 vaccinated with at least one dose by the end of April, before a possible third wave hits.

“We have to avoid any rebound, an undesired, extraordinary situation of a rebound in infections like those that are occurring in some other parts of the world,” Lopez Obrador said. “We do not want a resurgence.”

It is unlikely that Mexico’s approximately six million vaccines delivered so far have played much of a role in the statistical reduction in deaths in recent weeks, and it is unclear how many Mexicans will take the shots.

The Mexican government has been widely using two Chinese-made vaccines, but suspicion remains due to a lack of information on their effectiveness, something that could encourage already widespread scepticism.

In a March 6-9 poll, only 52 percent of the 1,000 Mexicans surveyed said they were willing to get vaccinated, according to the GEA-ISA polling firm; 20 percent said they were not sure, and 28 percent said they would not get vaccinated. The poll had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points.