Distrust plays role in surge in deaths

Mexicans wait to seek medical care amid fear of hospitals

MEXICO CITY» A gray Suzuki stopped outside the General Hospital of Mexico and deposited a heaving Victor Bailón at the entrance. He had refused to come to the hospital for days, convinced that doctors were killing coronavirus patients. By the time he hobbled into the triage area and collapsed on the floor, it was too late.

“Papito, breathe!” his wife screamed. “Please breathe.”

Within an hour, Bailón was dead.

Mexico is battling one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world, with more than 52,000 confirmed deaths, the third-highest toll of the pandemic. And its struggle has been made even harder by a pervasive phenomenon: a deeply rooted fear of hospitals.

The problem has long plagued nations overwhelmed by unfamiliar diseases. During the Ebola epidemic in 2014, many in Sierra Leone believed that hospitals had become hopeless death traps, leading sick people to stay home and inadvertently spread the disease to their families and neighbors.

Here in Mexico, a similar vicious cycle is taking place. As the pandemic crushes an already weak health care system, with bodies piling up in refrigerated trucks, many Mexicans see the COVID ward as a place where only death awaits — to be avoided at all cost.

The consequences, doctors,

nurses and health ministers say, are severe. Mexicans are waiting to seek medical care until their cases are so bad that doctors can do little to help them. Thousands are dying before ever seeing the inside of a hospital, government data show, succumbing to the virus in taxis on the way there or in sickbeds at home.

Fighting infections at home may not only spread the disease more widely, epidemiologists say, but it also hides the true toll of the epidemic because an untold number of people die without ever being tested — and officially counted — as coronavirus victims.

Many Mexicans say they have good reason to be wary of hospitals: Nearly 40% of people hospitalized with confirmed cases of the virus in Mexico City, the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak, end up dying, government data show, a high mortality rate even when compared with some of the worst coronavirus hot spots worldwide. During the peak of the pandemic in New York City, fewer than 25% of coronavirus patients died in hospitals, studies have estimated.

During a surge of cases in May, about half of all COVID-19 patients in Mexico City were dying within 12 hours of getting to the hospital, said Dr. Oliva López Arellano, Mexico City’s health minister.

In the United States, people who died typically made it five days in the hospital.

Doctors say more patients would survive if they sought help earlier. Delaying treatment, they argue, simply leads to more deaths in hospitals — which then generates even more fear of hospitals.

The distrust is so pronounced that relatives of patients in Ecatepec, a municipality outside of Mexico City, stormed a hospital in May, attacking its employees, filming themselves next to bags of corpses and telling reporters that the institution was killing their loved ones.

“After seeing videos of what happens to people inside hospitals, screw that,” said Bailón’s brother, José Eduardo, who had recently spent 60 days at home recovering from his own bout with what he believes was the coronavirus. “I’d rather stay home and die there.”

But many people who die at home in Mexico — or even on the way to the hospital — are never tested for the virus, so they are not counted as coronavirus victims. Instead, they fall into a statistical black hole of fatalities that are not officially tied to the pandemic.

Even by the official count, Mexico has already suffered more coronavirus deaths than any other nation but the United States and Brazil. And the government said recently that during the last several months, there were 71,000 more deaths than expected, compared with previous years — an indication that the virus has claimed many more lives than the official tally suggests.

Nearly 70% of Mexicans said they would feel “unsafe” taking their loved ones to the hospital during the pandemic, in a survey published last month. A third said they would prefer to care for their relatives themselves.