Mexico’s confirmed coronavirus death toll surpasses India’s Thursday to become the third highest in the world, after months in which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador underestimated the virus while his government scrambled to control it.
According to a database of the New York Times, Mexico recorded 155,145 coronavirus deaths during the pandemic as of Friday morning. That is about 66,000 less than the official death toll in Brazil, the country hardest hit after the United States.
Nationwide hospitals, especially in Mexico City, are trying to provide beds and ventilators. Doctors are overwhelmed. People have already filled queues of oxygen for family members who gasp for air in their homes.
Mexico has reported more than 1.8 million cases, and its case load has increased since early December. The daily average number of new infections during the past week – 16,319 – was the seventh highest in the world, just behind France.
The country’s death toll has also risen sharply, even though Mr. López Obrador that the end of the pandemic’s devastation is just around the corner. The average daily deaths in Mexico over the past week in Mexico are higher than those of Britain and the second next to the United States.
And for all that, the real impact of the disease on Mexico is probably much worse than official figures suggest.
Test levels are low and many infected people stay at home because they distrust hospitals. A New York Times investigation in May found that the government did not report hundreds, possibly thousands, of coronavirus deaths in Mexico City.
When Mr. López Obrador this week says that he also has the virus, few Mexicans were surprised. For months, he minimized the pandemic by claiming that religious amulets, for example, protected him and refused to wear a mask.
He worked through his illness and said on Monday that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mexico’s largest epidemiologist, Hugo López-Gatell, told reporters on Thursday that López Obrador was experiencing minimal symptoms.
Some people in Mexico are worried that Mr. López Obrador, 67, will once again reduce the risk of coronavirus after recovering with the help of medical treatment, just like President Donald J. Trump did after a Covid-19 infection in October.
In Mexico City this week, Lilia Ramírez Díaz undertook the second trip of the day to fill an oxygen tank for her father, who has diabetes and struggled at home against Covid-19.
Both mr. López Obrador as her father contracted the virus, she said in an interview, but the president does not have to look for an oxygen tank and beg. ‘