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Editor's Note: Jorge G. Castañeda is a CNN contributor. He was Minister of Foreign Relations of Mexico. He is currently a professor at New York University and his next book, "America through Foreign Eyes", will be published by Oxford University Press in June. The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author. Read more opinion at CNNe.com/opinion.
(CNN Spanish) - For weeks, the numbers of victims - contagions, deaths, asymptomatic patients - of the pandemic in Mexico have been the subject of controversy.
The discussion and skepticism of public opinion and experts is not exclusive to that country. Debates about models, data and forecasts have proliferated in the United States. In China, many disbelieved death figures in Wuhan, and in some European countries, deaths in nursing homes were not counted for several weeks. There are lags, material difficulties in reporting data, desires for dissimulation - normal for any government - and human error.
What is new in Mexico is that the criticism of the figures used by the Andrés Manuel López Obrador regime today comes from some international media. Until now, only Mexican analysts or experts had expressed their doubts about the numbers - the comments of former Mexican Health Secretary Julio Frenk Mora (1), my columns on CNNE and the Nexos magazine, for example - but the Mexican press had been focused on microcases: a hospital here, a funeral home there, a cemetery here. But last week, simultaneously - although not coordinated - the newspapers (2) El País de España, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published detailed and extensive reports on the inconsistencies in official statistics in Mexico. Needless to say, this caused a storm in the country.
The official in charge of the group that leads the fight against covid-19 in Mexico, the undersecretary of Prevention and Promotion of Health of the Ministry of Health, Hugo-López Gattell, assured that he "is struck ... that they appear synchronously these four notes (he includes one from The Washington Post (3) that is not really equivalent), followed by a wide dissemination on social networks by individuals linked to previous administrations, to the pharmaceutical industry and to a few with political aspirations ”. It conspires, then. López Obrador himself described (4) the Times as "famous, but with little ethics ... biased". However, several officials have publicly acknowledged that there is confusion with the figures that Mexico must resolve, better sooner than later.
This situation, added to the inaccuracies pointed out by the mentioned means, focuses on two variables: contagion and death. Regarding the latter, the official Mexican figure remains surprisingly low (5) (3,465 until Sunday, May 10), and stable (112 deaths that day). The New York Times correspondent reported that in Mexico City, where about a quarter of the country's deaths occur, his sources assured him that the actual number was more than three times higher. One of the authors of the Wall Street Journal article reviewed more than one hundred death certificates in a center of the Mexican capital and found that more than half of the deaths not attributed to the coronavirus carried a handwritten notation that said: “probable covid- 19 ”.
This is in addition to comparative figures that show how mortality in Mexico, measured per inhabitant and not by infections, according to the Government, is very low: 27 per 100,000 people, similar to that of many other Latin American countries ( 6), but much lower than the United States (24.66). Chile (1.72), Colombia (0.96) and Argentina (0.71) publish lower figures, but those of Mexico pale against Spain (57.24), Italy (50.87), France (39.8 ) and even Germany (9.24). The comparison is hard to believe, especially in light of the chilling scene descriptions in popular hospitals, pantheons, or neighborhoods.
The Spanish newspaper focused more on infections or infections. Mexico performs fewer tests per capita than other countries on the continent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It uses a system called Sentinel, used in various countries for other diseases, which is equivalent to a non-probabilistic sampling of disease data collection centers. Although many have questioned the relevance of this method for the covid-19, the Government defends it and responds that there would be a multiplier of the number of infections in the sample that could give a reliable total.
The problem, according to the report by El País and many Mexican experts, is that López Obrador never offered a definitive version of that multiplier. Sometimes his collaborators speak of eight, in others of 20 and in some, of 30. For this reason, the Madrid-based newspaper gave a range between 620,000 and 730,000. The official Mexican figure, recognized as less than reality by the Government itself, was just over 35,000 on Sunday.
The international media exposed what Mexican public opinion already sensed. The data provided by the Government is not credible, although it may or may not - in my opinion - be subject to serious reports. Furthermore, these reports began to point to a demonic dilemma for López Obrador. If the data on deaths and infections in Mexico is as low as its government claims, it does not seem so easy to justify a massive closure of the economy, which today leads groups such as The Economist Intelligence Unit (7) to forecast a fall of 9.5% GDP this year, the highest of any rich or middle-income country. Conversely, if the terrible economic crisis was the price to pay to avoid a true health catastrophe, the official figures should be corrected. Quickly and massively. For now, the disproportion between one thing and the other is obvious. At bottom, that was the implication of the coverage of the international press.
coronavirus