Mexico reached the 100,000 mark in COVID-19 deaths on Thursday, displaying only the fourth country – after the United States, Brazil and India – to do so.
José Luis Alomía Zegarra, Mexico’s executive of epidemiology, said there were 100,104 approved COVID-19 deaths as of Thursday. The milestone came down a week after Mexico said it had topped 1 million recorded coronavirus cases. However, officials said that the number is probably much more important because of low levels of testing.
With little testing being done and a fear of hospitals, many in Mexico are left to home improvements and relatives’ care. This is the case in the poverty-stricken Ampliación Magdalena neighbourhood on Mexico City’s east side, where most characters work off-the-books as day labourers at the city’s sprawling produce market.
The busy market was the scene for one of the first big breaks in the greater metropolitan area, home to 21 million people, and so early on in the pandemic, local morticians were swamped with corpses.
The local funeral home “looked like a confectionery, with people lined up, said community leader Daniel Alfredo López González. The owner of the funeral house told that some people waited to get bodies embalmed for burial while others were already standing in the line to get their relatives’ remains cremated.
The lack of testing – Mexico is testing only people with critical symptoms and has tested only around 2.5 million tests in the nation of 130 million There is a lack of hospitals in many areas and the constant fear of the ones that do exist, has created a false breeding ground for ignorance, suspicion and fear.
But López Gonzalez, whose job involves distributing out free surgical masks to residents.
Mexico’s point man on the pandemic, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell, was bristling when asked about Mexico reaching the 100,000 deaths point.