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MEXICO CITY – Mexico passed the 100,000 mark in COVID-19 deaths, becoming only the fourth country to do so amid concerns about the lingering physical and psychological scars on survivors.
José Luis Alomía Zegarra, Mexico’s director of epidemiology, announced late Thursday that Mexico had 100,104 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, behind only the United States, Brazil and India.
The milestone comes less than a week after Mexico topped 1 million registered coronavirus cases, though officials agree the number is probably much higher because of low levels of testing.
Workers place the coffin of 86-year-old Gabina Salgado Husca, who died of complications related to the new coronavirus, into her grave in the Valle de Chalco municipal cemetery on the outskirts of Mexico City, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
The coverage of the back-to-back milestones has raised the hackles of some government officials.
Mexico’s point man on the pandemic, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell, bristled when asked about Mexico reaching the 100,000 deaths point, criticizing the media for “being alarmist,” in the same way he has criticized those who suggest the government is undercounting COVID-19 deaths or providing contradictory and weak advice on using face masks.
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“The epidemic is terrible in itself, you don’t have to add drama to it,” said López-Gatell, suggesting some media outlets were focusing on the number of deaths to sell newspapers or spark “political confrontation.”
“Putting statistics on the front page doesn’t, in my view, help much,” he said.
Doctors Delia Caudillo, center, and Monserrat Castaneda, prepare to conduct a COVID-19 test on 82-year-old Modesta Caballero Serrano, as her granddaughter gives her antibacterial gel, at her home in the Venustiano Carranza borough of Mexico City, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Mexico resembles a divided country, where some people are so unconcerned by the pandemic they won’t wear masks, while others are so scared they descend into abject terror at the first sign of shortness of breath.
Besides the trauma of the deaths, many coronavirus survivors say the psychosis caused by the pandemic is one of the most lasting effects.
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With little testing being done — Mexico tests only people with severe symptoms and has performed only around 2.5 million tests in a country of 130 million — and a general fear of hospitals, many in Mexico are left to home remedies and relatives’ care.
Such is the case in the poverty-stricken Ampliación Magdalena neighborhood on Mexico City’s rough east side, where most people work off-the-books as day laborers at the city’s sprawling produce market.
Dr. Monserrat Castaneda is sprayed with a disinfectant after conducting a COVID-19 test inside a home, in the Venustiano Carranza borough of Mexico City, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
The busy market was the scene of one of the first big outbreaks in the greater metropolitan area, home to 21 million people, and so early on in the pandemic local undertakers were swamped with corpses.
The local funeral home “looked like a bakery, with people lined up, with hearses lined up,” said community leader Daniel Alfredo López González. The owner of the funeral home told him some people waited to get bodies embalmed for burial while others were in the line to get their relatives’ remains cremated.
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The lack of hospitals in some areas and fears of the ones that do exist, along with low levels of testing, has created a fertile breeding ground for ignorance, suspicion and fear.
López Gónzalez described getting the disease himself. Even though he recovered, the fear was crushing.
Sanitation technicians disinfect a tent used to test patients for COVID-19 at the Ajusco Medio General Hospital in Mexico City, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
“It is a tremendous psychosis. In the end, sometimes the disease itself may not be so serious, but it is for a person’s psyche,” López Gónzalez said. “That is, knowing that you have a disease like this can kill you as bad as the disease itself.”
Public health outreach worker Dulce María López González - Daniel Alfredo’s sister - nursed four members of her family through COVID-19, relying on phone-in advice and medications from a doctor who was nursing his own relatives.
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Her first brush with the pandemic’s psychological effects were her own fears that her job as a health worker might have exposed her to it.
“I can’t breath,” she remembers thinking. “And I said to myself, no, it is a psychological question.”
A young man waits to be tested for COVID-19 outside the Ajusco Medio General Hospital in Mexico City, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
She forced herself to calm down, noting: “If I get worked up thinking I have the disease, that I am going to die, then I am going to have a heart attack.”
Her second brush with its effects involved her relatives’ decision to ride out the disease at home. She had to desperately search for ways to get scarce and expensive medical equipment.
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“There came a point when I said no, I can’t do it,” López González said.
The final straw was when her husband, spared in the first round of infections, had what appeared to be a panic attack in a taxi, thinking he had been infected and couldn’t breathe.
“He started to enter a sort of state of psychosis in which he thought he had the disease,” she said.
Still, they were terrified of government hospitals.
“It is really like a cycle of terror,” she noted. “We were afraid to go to a hospital after everything you hear on social media. It was an enormous psychosis.”
But López Gonzalez, whose job involves handing out free surgical masks to residents, has also seen the other side of the psychological maelstrom: those who don’t care.
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“I saw this person who I had given a mask to, and I told her she shouldn’t be outside without it,” she recalled. “She told me that no, nothing was going to happen to her. Two weeks later we found out she had died of COVID.”
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