‘False that Mexico has the highest lethality of Covid-19 in Latin America’ says AMLO

According to the Reforma newspaper, Mexico is the country with the highest lethality for Covid-19 in Latin America, above Brazil, the country of the region with the highest number of deaths.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador assured that it is false that Mexico is the country with the highest lethality of Covid-19 in Latin America and asserted that there is a way to verify it.

“(The media) They are determined to create alarms, to give this type of false news, to say that Mexico is the first place in lethality in Latin America is a falsehood. The only thing I would recommend is that, with data from the World Health Organization, it be reviewed how many deaths there have been in the countries of Latin America and what is the population of each of the countries of Latin America, ”he refuted.

Coronavirus in Mexico

According to the Reforma newspaper, Mexico is the country with the highest lethality for Covid-19 in Latin America, a region already considered as the epicenter of the pandemic, with a rate of 10.7%.

The media published that, according to Johns Hopkins University, the case fatality rate is even higher than Brazil, which although it has the highest number of deaths (22,666) and records a high number of infections (363,211), this results in a death rate of 6.2% case fatality.

In this sense, the undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell, explained that the case fatality is the proportion or percentage of people who die of a disease, in this case, Covid-19, divided by the number of people who suffer from it.

México llegó a ocho mil 134 muertes por coronavirus

This indicator is estimated in populations through epidemiological surveillance when an exhaustive count is made of absolutely all cases and all deaths, added the undersecretary.

He argued that this is why comparisons of the fatality of the disease cannot be made between countries in the same region or around the world, because each nation has a different way of approaching epidemiological surveillance.

In addition, he argued that no country in the world counts all its cases, although it seems that some of them have more than a million infections, they are far from being all cases.

López-Gatell specified that in Mexico, as it has been raised since January, there is no particular interest in accounting for minor cases, since epidemiological surveillance is much more than counting and having numbers, they are not the most important thing, but are the minimum statistics that allows to build quantitative knowledge about a complex phenomenon, such as this pandemic.

Mexico Covid Infections, May 26th

In Mexico, serious cases, according to the Epidemiological Surveillance Guideline, are people with sufficient alteration to require hospitalization and they must be counted at 100% and laboratory samples must be taken from all of them.

However, in mild cases, it was decided from the start that tests would not be done at 100%, but only at a percentage sufficient to recognize the patterns of Covid-19 spread in the national territory and its change over time.

“This is important because it is impossible and useless to try to count all the cases or all the events of a massive (immeasurable) phenomenon. This occurs in Mexico and absolutely throughout the world, “he said.

Likewise, he mentioned that if people with mild illness who have a low risk of complications go to the health services, they represented a risk for everyone because they would produce contagions and that would not be favorable to epidemic control.

In addition, they would occupy spaces of attention in which priority should be given to people who have had the disease complicated or are at risk of complicating it.

Source: notimex.gob.mx

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