Mexico Undercounted COVID Deaths by Over 100,000

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's government has finally recognized that its already tragic coronavirus death toll is actually much higher than the official tally. A new report from the country's Health Ministry showed that over 110,000 victims of the coronavirus went uncounted in the first year of the pandemic.

Just last week, Mexico announced that it passed 200,000 confirmed coronavirus related deaths, a staggering number that placed the country third globally in fatalities after the United States and Brazil. 

But a new report “Excess Mortality in Mexico”, found that between February 14 2020 and February 14 2021, the number was closer to 295,000. 

And since February 15, Mexico has seen more than 27,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 deaths, putting the current total around 320,000, which would place it second on the grim list of coronavirus deaths above Brazil.

“It's the numerical reflection of the inaction and the little effectiveness that the government had or that the government has continued to have in handling this pandemic,” said Xavier Tello, a Mexican public health analyst.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's response to the pandemic has been controversial, to say the least. He spent months downplaying the use of facemasks, often appearing in public without one while simultaneously surrounded by hordes of his supporters. At the beginning of the pandemic, he proudly promoted his collection of amulets which he called his “bodyguards” against the virus.

The president has repeatedly said that low hospital bed occupancy rates were an indicator that Mexico's pandemic response was successful, but according to Tello, that was exactly why the death toll was much higher.

“These deaths didn't occur inside a hospital, they died elsewhere.”

Critics of the government's pandemic response have long doubted the official tally. They claim it only accounted for coronavirus deaths registered at hospitals, and didn't recognize the tens of thousands of people dying at home without having taken a COVID-19 test. They blamed the government's downplaying of the seriousness of the virus as a reason for people not seeking help until the last moment, as well as a general fear among the population of going to designated COVID-19 hospitals and contracting the virus.

Tello called it “the strategy that we never saw.”

“It was never about saving lives, it was to use the hospitals to rationalize, to boast that the system was not saturated when it was.”

As the pandemic progressed and Mexico's official death toll ranked as one of the highest in the world, the World Health Organization's Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “Mexico is in bad shape” in late November.

“The number of increasing cases and deaths in Mexico is very worrisome,” Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing.

Although the government attempted to heed the warning and discourage celebrations in the final months of 2020, many of the deaths appear to have come in a second wave during the winter with around 75,000 in the first month and a half of 2021. Experts anticipated a large uptick in cases after November's Day of the Dead and the December holiday season where family gatherings are an important tradition.

But the government's messaging appeared at odds with their actions. In January photos surfaced of the country's controversial public health secretary, Hugo López-Gatell, maskless on vacation at a beach in Oaxaca in Mexico’s south.

Both López Obrador and López-Gatell contracted the coronavirus in 2021, but recovered. They both appeared in public soon after, again maskless.

López Obrador didn’t directly address the new report in today’s morning news conference, however, he did urge citizens to “be conscious” and “try not to get sick” as Mexico heads into its most important spring holiday, Semana Santa, (Holy Week) when most have extended work vacations and children break from school.

The excess mortality report released Sunday came hours before Mexico received 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine from the United States to offset local shortages. Mexico’s vaccine rollout has been one of the slowest in Latin America, using a hodgepodge of vaccines from Russia and China with an aim to vaccinate the elderly in rural areas first. The arrival of more vaccines will be welcomed as Mexico attempts to inoculate nearly 130 million people.

Mexico’s new designation as the second most hard hit nation globally is particularly startling considering the two other countries at the top of the list, Brazil and the U.S, both have much larger populations at 210 million and 330 million respectively.

And Tello believes that the death toll that the government recently admitted existed could eventually “be much more,” according to mathematicians analyzing additional unrecognized deaths.

“We could really be over five hundred thousand deaths.”