Two doctors test a 74-year-old patient for covid-19 at his home in the Venustiano Carranza neighborhood of Mexico City.Rebecca Blackwell / AP
On Wednesday, the authorities of Mexico City, concerned about the increase in hospitalizations due to covid-19, began to implement a system to track infections of covid-19 through a QR code, the first results of which were released this Monday: there are 75 new positive cases and at least 6,000 people who will be notified as of this Monday for having had contact with those infected in bars, restaurants, museums, cinemas, gyms or other places in which the new system.
"We launched it at a time when contagions increase with the idea of breaking that chain," says Eduardo Clark, general director of Digital Government of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP).
The Mexican capital, which in June had achieved a drop in hospitalizations due to covid-19, has registered an increase in these since the first week of November, which puts the Government led by Claudia Sheinbaum on alert.
The new tracking system is already mandatory for some closed spaces in the city and the authorities estimate that about 80,000 businesses are implementing it in its pilot version, out of the 250,000 registered in the capital.
Clark said that since Wednesday some 900,000 people have reported their visit to the premises in the system, for which he considers the implementation of the measure a success.
"We are surprised.
This is very valuable, because the population that continues to go to activities outside the home understands the importance of receiving notifications in case of having been at risk ”, explains the official.
The initiative is supported by the restaurant industry, which on Friday informed its partners in a statement about the implementation of the new system, a measure with which they hope to avoid increasing restrictions in the capital, whose economy has been hit hard by the pandemic. .
The Government of Mexico City decided to relax at the end of June the restrictions imposed to avoid contagion by covid-19, because the city registered a downward trend in the number of hospitalizations, which made local authorities think that the worst of the pandemic had happened in the capital, one of the epicenters of the coronavirus in Mexico.
The capital registered the highest peak of infections between May 15 and 21, when 6,500 hospitalizations were reported.
In August the number of people hospitalized reached 3,800, but it was from September that the numbers began to turn red until reaching 4,645 hospitalizations in November, bringing the capital dangerously close to the statistics of the worst moments of the pandemic.
Due to this increase, the local government announced new restrictions, which include the prohibition of activities in bars, canteens and clubs, the limitation of the sale of alcoholic beverages in restaurants from seven in the afternoon and the implementation of a dry law in stores self-service in eight capital city delegations on weekends.
The authorities appeal to collective responsibility, but over the weekend there were agglomerations in the historic center of the city, with hundreds of people interacting, many of them without masks or maintaining the recommended healthy distance.
Although the new tracking system has been implemented in places in tourist areas and with a lot of commercial activity in the city, its use is not mandatory for customers, who must scan, if they want, the QR code installed at the entrance of the premises and register your visit by entering your mobile phone number in the form created by the authorities.
"Every night we review the database of positive numbers of covid-19 and compare that data with the new system, to find out if any of these [infected] people appears in the visit information of any of the registered establishments", Clark explains.
In case of registering a contact with infected people, the authorities wait four days to make notifications through text messages, which is the time it takes for the virus to incubate in a person.
If the person has had mild symptoms, it is recommended to stay home for 14 days and take a free test at the open health kiosks in the city.
Clark says that since July they have made an effort to increase the implementation of tests to detect contagions, going from 4,000 on that date to 7,000 daily tests in August and with plans to increase them to 12,000 or 14,000 in the coming weeks.
“For us this new system is important because it reduces the gap we had when notifying people who were in public spaces at risk of infection. There was no system that allowed direct interaction. Now it is important that people find out if they were in a situation of risk, "says the official. Although with the new system the local authorities aspire to break the chains of infections, they do not rule out the implementation of more restrictions to tackle the virus. “We generate daily inputs to make decisions about activity restrictions. As long as we do not see a reduction in the growth rate of the epidemic curve or in the increase in hospital saturation, we will continue taking measures ”, he adds. Will Mexico City go to a red light if this negative trend continues? "I'm not ruling it out," warns Clark.
