Mexico ignores wave of deaths in capital
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths from the coronavirus in Mexico City, dismissing anxious officials who have tallied more than three times as many fatalities in the capital than the government publicly acknowledges, according to officials and confidential data.
The tensions have come to a head in recent weeks, with Mexico City alerting the government to the deaths repeatedly, hoping it will come clean to the public about the true toll of the virus on the nation’s biggest city and, by extension, the country at large.
But that has not happened. Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals in Mexico City say the reality of the epidemic is being hidden from the country. In some hospitals, patients lie on the floor, splayed on mattresses. Elderly people are propped up on metal chairs because there are not enough beds, while patients are turned away to search for space in less-prepared hospitals. Many die while searching, several doctors said.
“It’s like we doctors are living in two different worlds, ” said Dr. Giovanna Avila, who works at Hospital de Especialidades Belisario Domínguez. “One is inside of the hospital with patients dying all the time. And the other is when we walk out onto the streets and see people walking around, clueless of what is going on and how bad the situation really is.”
Mexico City officials have tabulated more than 2,500 deaths from the virus and from serious respiratory illnesses that doctors suspect were related to COVID-19, according to the data, which was reviewed by the New York Times. Yet the federal government is reporting about 700 in the area, which includes Mexico City and the municipalities on its outskirts.
Nationwide, the federal government has reported about 3,000 confirmed deaths from the virus, plus nearly 250 suspected of being related, in a country of more than 120 million people. But experts say Mexico has only a minimal sense of the real scale of the epidemic because it is testing so few people.
Far fewer than one in 1,000 people in Mexico are tested for the virus — by far the lowest of the dozens of nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which average about 23 tests for every 1,000 people.
The government says Mexico has been faring better than many of the world’s largest countries, and on Monday its COVID-19 czar estimated that the final death toll would be around 6,000 people.
“We have flattened the curve,” Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the health ministry official who has become the face of the country’s response, said this week.
But the government did not respond to questions about the deaths in Mexico City. It denied repeated requests by the Times over the course of three weeks to identify all deaths related to respiratory illnesses since January, saying the data was incomplete.
One former health secretary, José Narro Robles, has accused Lopez-Gatell of lying to the people of Mexico. And some state governments are beginning to draw similar conclusions: that, much like Mexico City found, the data presented by the government does not reflect reality.
In Mexico City, the doubts started a month ago, when the city’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, began to suspect that federal data and modeling on the epidemic were flawed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
She had already instructed her staff to call every public hospital in the Mexico City area to ask about all confirmed and suspected COVID-19 deaths, the people said. In the last week, that effort found that the deaths were more than three times what the federal government reported.
The disagreements have taken place largely behind the scenes, as Sheinbaum, who declined to comment for this article, has been loath to publicly embarrass President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her close political ally. The city and the federal government continue to work together on a number of fronts, including getting ventilators.
But the data from Mexico City calls into question the federal government’s grasp of the crisis in the country.
“That is shocking,” said Fernando Alarid-Escudero, who has a Ph.D. in health decision sciences and who developed an independent model in collaboration with scientists at Stanford University to chart the curve of the epidemic in Mexico. “If that is case, and we are not really capturing all those people who eventually die, we are not getting a sense of the picture.”
“We are way underestimating the magnitude of the epidemic,” he added.
The gap in information has left many Mexicans with a sense that their country has avoided the harrowing outbreaks afflicting nations like the United States, where more than 1.2 million people have been infected and more than 75,000 people have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
The main model the country is believed to now be using assumes only 5 percent of the infected population show symptoms, and that only 5 percent of those patients will go to the hospital, according to modeling documents obtained by the Times.
“Their model is wrong,” said Laurie Ann Ximenez-Fyvie, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, adding that symptomatic and severe cases could be significantly higher. “There is very good consensus on that.”
Several experts also questioned Mexico’s assumptions of how quickly the epidemic will pass. Its model shows a sharp rise in infections, followed by a sharp decline. But in almost no other country in the world has there been a rapid decline after a peak.
“There is a long tail for the curve, and the number of deaths does not drop to zero anytime in the near future,” said Nilanjan Chatterjee, a professor in the department of biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “The graph they are using is inconsistent with the shapes of the curve in other countries.”