The number of confirmed coronavirus deaths in Mexico surpassed that of India on Thursday to become the third largest in the world, after months in which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador minimized the virus while his government struggled to control it.
As of Friday morning, Mexico had recorded 155,145 deaths from coronavirus during the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. This is about 66,000 less than the official death toll in Brazil, the country hardest hit after the United States.
Hospitals across the country, especially in Mexico City, are struggling to provide beds and fans. Doctors are overwhelmed. People line up to refill oxygen tanks for relatives who are short of breath in their homes.
Mexico has reported more than 1.8 million cases, and its number has increased since the beginning of December. The average daily number of new infections last week – 16,319 – was the seventh highest in the world, behind France.
The death toll in the country has also been increasing rapidly, even when López Obrador insists that the end of the devastation of the pandemic is coming. The average of 1,281 daily deaths in Mexico last week is higher than that of Great Britain and second only to the United States.
And for all of that, the real impact of the disease in Mexico is probably much worse than the official figures indicate.
Test levels are low and many infected people stay at home because they do not trust hospitals. An investigation by the New York Times found in May that the government was not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of coronavirus deaths in Mexico City.
When López Obrador said this week that he also had the virus, few Mexicans were surprised. He spent months minimizing the pandemic, claiming that religious amulets protected him, for example, and refusing to wear a mask.
He overcame his illness, saying on Monday that he had spoken with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Mexico’s top epidemiologist, Hugo López-Gatell, told reporters on Thursday that López Obrador was showing minimal symptoms.
Some people in Mexico fear that Mr. López Obrador, 67, will again minimize the danger of coronavirus after recovering with the help of first-line medical treatment, just as President Donald J. Trump did after a Covid- 19 in October.
This week in Mexico City, Lilia Ramírez Díaz was making the second trip of the day to refill an oxygen tank for her father, who has diabetes and is fighting Covid-19 at home.
Both López Obrador and her father contracted the virus, she said in an interview, but the president “doesn’t have to go around looking for and begging for an oxygen tank.”