More than half of Mexicans believe that the coronavirus situation is out of control and nearly two-thirds want lockdown measures to continue, a new poll reveals.
Conducted by the newspaper El Financiero on May 22 and 23, the poll found that 52% of 410 adult Mexicans believe that the coronavirus situation has not been controlled, as President López Obrador claimed a month ago and repeated Thursday morning.
In contrast, 44% of respondents said that the government has the situation under control.
The percentage of respondents who believe that it is out of control is up 13% compared to a poll conducted by El Financiero in mid-April while the percentage of those who think it is under control is down 12%.
In the period between the dates when the two polls were conducted, Mexico recorded almost 60,000 Covid-19 cases and more than 6,500 deaths.
Asked to offer an opinion on the government’s coronavirus mitigation measures, 64% of poll respondents said that more restrictions should be enforced and stay-at-home orders/recommendations should be extended, while 35% said that it’s time to lift restrictions and attempt to live life normally in order to limit damage to the economy.
Six in 10 poll respondents said that they mostly believe the information provided by the government about the number of coronavirus cases in Mexico while four in 10 said they don’t.
Thirty-eight percent of those polled believe that the pandemic is in a growth phase, down from 43% on May 9, while 41% think that Mexico is currently at the peak of the outbreak, 6% higher than the previous poll.
Just under one in five respondents – 18% – believe that the pandemic is on the wane.
The percentage of respondents who said that they personally know someone who has been infected with coronavirus increased to 25% in the latest poll compared to just 12% in the survey conducted two weeks earlier.
Two-thirds of those polled said that they are very worried about coronavirus, up from 60%.
Just under seven in 10 respondents said they expected new outbreaks of Covid-19 to occur once restrictions on the economy are lifted while 27% took the opposite view.
Asked to offer their opinion on how six different countries including Mexico have responded to the coronavirus crisis, poll respondents rated China most highly.
Sixty-one percent of respondents said the East Asian country has done a very good or good job in fighting the virus, while 58% said the same about Germany.
Spain responded well to the crisis, according to 46% of those polled, while 41% said that the United States has done a good job in combating Covid-19.
However, 42% said that the U.S. – the global epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak – has performed badly or very badly in its response to Covid-19.
Mexico rated fifth among the six countries, with 36% saying that the response has been good or very good. A third of respondents said that Mexico has done a bad or very bad job in fighting the coronavirus while 27% said that the response has been neither good nor bad.
The only country to rank below Mexico in terms of its response to the pandemic was Brazil, which has recorded the second highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, according to statistics compiled by the Johns Hopkins University.
Source: El Financiero (sp)
