Mexico becomes 4th country to hit 100,000 COVID-19 deaths

MEXICO CITY — Mexico passed the 100,000 mark in COVID-19 deaths Thursday, becoming only the fourth country — behind the United States, Brazil and India — to do so.

José Luis Alomía Zegarra, Mexico’s director of epidemiology, said there were 100,104 confirmed COVID-19 deaths as of Thursday. The milestone comes less than a week after Mexico said it had topped 1 million registered coronavirus cases, though officials agree the number is probably much higher because of low levels of testing.

Mexico’s living are bearing the scars of the pandemic along with their lost friends and loved ones. Many surviving coronavirus victims say the psychosis caused by the pandemic is one of the most lasting effects.

Mexico resembles a divided country, where some people are so unconcerned they won’t wear masks, while others are so scared they descend into abject terror at the first sign of shortness of breath.

With little testing being done and a general fear of hospitals, many in Mexico are left to home remedies and relatives’ care. Such is the case in the poverty-stricken Ampliación Magdalena neighbourhood on Mexico City’s rough east side, where most people work off-the-books as day labourers at the city’s sprawling produce market.

The busy market was the scene of one of the first big outbreaks in the greater metropolitan area, home to 21 million people, and so early on in the pandemic local undertakers were swamped with corpses.

The local funeral home “looked like a bakery, with people lined up, with hearses lined up,” said community leader Daniel Alfredo López González. The owner of the funeral home told him some people waited to get bodies embalmed for burial while others were in the line to get their relatives’ remains cremated.

The lack of testing — Mexico tests only people with severe symptoms and has performed only around 2.5 million tests in a country of 130 million — the lack of hospitals in many areas and the fear of the ones that do exist, has created a fertile breeding ground for ignorance, suspicion and fear.

López Gónzalez described getting the disease himself. Even though he recovered, the fear was crushing.

“It is a tremendous psychosis. In the end, sometimes the disease itself may not be so serious, but it is for a person’s psyche,” López Gónzalez said. “That is, knowing that you have a disease like this can kill you as bad as the disease itself.”

Public health outreach worker Dulce María López González – Daniel Alfredo’s sister – nursed four members of her family through COVID-19, relying on phone-in advice and medications from a doctor who was nursing his own relatives.

Her first brush with the pandemic’s psychological effects were her own fears that her job as a health worker might have exposed her to it.

“I can’t breath,” she remembers thinking. “And I said to myself, no, it is a psychological question.”

She forced herself to calm down, noting: “If I get worked up thinking I have the disease, that I am going to die, then I am going to have a heart attack.”

Her second brush with its effects involved her relatives’ decision to ride out the disease at home. She had to desperately search for ways to get scarce and expensive medical equipment.

“There came a point when I said no, I can’t do it,” López González said.

The final straw was when her husband, spared in the first round of infections, had what appeared to be a panic attack in a taxi, thinking he had been infected and couldn’t breath.

“He started to enter a sort of state of psychosis in which he thought he had the disease, and it probably could have given him a heart attack,” she said.

Still, they were terrified of government hospitals.

“It is really like a cycle of terror,” she noted. “We were afraid to go to a hospital after everything you hear on social media. It was an enormous psychosis.”

But López Gonzalez, whose job involves handing out free surgical masks to residents, has also seen the other side of the psychological maelstrom: those who don’t care.

“I saw this person who I had given a mask to, and I told her she shouldn’t be outside without it,” she recalled. “She told me that no, nothing was going to happen to her. Two weeks later we found out she had died of COVID.”

Mexico’s pointman on the pandemic, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell, bristled when asked about Mexico reaching the 100,000 deaths point.

He criticized the media for “being alarmist” in focusing on the figure, in the same way he has criticized those who suggest the government is undercounting the deaths, those who have questioned the country’s low testing rate or the government’s contradictory and weak advice on using face masks.

“The epidemic is terrible in itself, you don’t have to add drama to it,” said López-Gatell, suggesting some media outlets were focusing on the number of deaths to sell newspapers or spark “political confrontation.”

Diego Delgado, The Associated Press