Healthcare workers warn of shortage of sedatives for intubated Covid patients

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December 8, 2020

Tatiana Clouthier brings business connections to her new role as minister of economy.

President López Obrador on Monday appointed his 2018 campaign chief Tatiana Clouthier as his new economy minister, asserting that she will help boost economic growth and maintain good relations with the business sector and unions.

Graciela Márquez, who had been economy minister since the current government took office in December 2018, will move to the board of the national statistics agency Inegi, López Obrador said.

The president said that Clouthier, who left her position as a ruling party lawmaker in the lower house of Congress to join the federal cabinet, is “a woman with principles, integrity and honesty.”

“She will help us to continue promoting economic activity in the country and … [maintain] good relations with the business sector and the labor sector. She’ll [also] continue promoting foreign trade,” López Obrador said, explaining they were the reasons he appointed her.

The daughter of the 1988 presidential candidate for the conservative, business-friendly National Action Party (PAN), Manuel Clouthier, the 56-year-old new economy minister is a strong communicator and could act as a vital link to the private sector as the government seeks to reinvigorate an economy that has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and looks set to record its worst annual contraction since the Great Depression.

Her appointment came just five days after López Obrador announced that chief of staff Alfonso Romo, who served as a key interlocutor with the business sector, was stepping down.

Clouthier, a Sinaloa native who has lived in Monterrey, Nuevo León, for many years, has longstanding relationships within the private sector that she cultivated herself as well as through her father – who died in a car accident a year after he ran for president – and her husband, a businessman.

She served as a federal deputy for the PAN between 2003 and 2005 but left that party in the latter year to sit as an independent. In 2009 she ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Pedro Garza García, an affluent municipality in the Monterrey metropolitan area.

Clouthier subsequently worked at a Monterrey university owned by Alfonso Romo before returning to politics with López Obrador’s Morena party, running a campaign that culminated in a landslide victory at the 2018 election.

Her appointment as economy minister was welcomed by several business groups.

Nuevo León industry association Caintra said in a statement that Clouthier knows the “industrial agenda” of the northern state and the concerns of its businesses firsthand.

Galia Borja moves from treasurer of the republic to Bank of México deputy governor. — Galia Borja moves from treasurer of the federation to Bank of México deputy governor.

The Business Coordinating Council, an umbrella organization of 12 business groups, said the new economy minister will find a “willingness” for dialogue in the private sector as well as proposals to aid the economic recovery.

The Confederation of Industrial Chambers said it was confident it would establish a close relationship with Clouthier, saying that there is a “plentiful and promising” common agenda.

Márquez, an academic and economist who had no experience in politics when she joined López Obrador’s cabinet, said she was satisfied with her work as economy minister and cited the implementation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) as a key achievement.

“The USMCA is implemented, we finished [the negotiations] and created all the regulations … for the treaty,” Márquez said.

López Obrador also announced Monday that he was nominating Galia Borja, currently treasurer of the federation, to be a deputy governor of the central bank. Elvira Concheiro, a researcher, will become treasurer, he said.

The president said the changes have nothing to do with a “gender quota” but instead are related to “the need to have men and women characterized by honesty in the public service.”

Eduardo Osuna, general director of the bank BBVA México, praised Borja’s appointment to the central bank deputy governor role.

“I think that it’s an appointment that points in the right direction [in terms of] the autonomy of the Bank of México,” he said, adding that she has the appropriate academic background to understand the bank’s challenges.

BBVA chief economist Carlos Serrano noted that it’s not the first time that a treasurer has moved into a deputy governor role at the central bank. “We saw it with Irene Espinosa,” he said.

Espinosa, treasurer during the governments led by former presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, is currently one of four deputy governors serving under Bank of México Governor Alejandro Díaz de León.

Source: Milenio (sp), El Financiero (sp)

World’s largest online math class wins a Guinness record

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December 8, 2020

YouTube math teacher Julioprofe. — YouTube math and physics teacher Julioprofe.

A popular Colombian educational YouTuber and Jalisco’s Ministry of Education joined forces and successfully set a new Guinness World Record for an online math class with the most attendants — 213,586 of them.

And yes, there was a question-and-answer session afterward.

The record to beat was only 1,600 students, but Julio Alberto Ríos Gallego, a civil engineer known online as “Julioprofe” to his 4.39 million subscribers on YouTube, was in it to win. He had already lost a bid for a Guinness record last year when he tried to break the record for the most people attending an in-person math class at Talent Land, an annual conference in Jalisco for inventors and entrepreneurs.

He failed to reach his goal when over 800 of his participants were disqualified.

This year’s online class lasted nearly an hour on the Jalisco Ministry of Education’s virtual forum, Recrea Academy, followed by a period for questions. Ríos, who explains math and physics problems on his channel, spoke during the virtual class about how mathematics applies to other subjects.

“Imagine a box or a kit of tools that accompanies us during our lives,” he said. “Some are simple, others are more sophisticated, but all serve some purpose. Logically in the case of mathematics, these tools are going to serve to resolve situations and solve problems in different fields.”

Ríos received congratulations from Jalisco Education Minister Juan Carlos Flores Miramontes, but perhaps the most heartfelt support came from supporters online, many of whom made visual memes expressing congratulations or hopes beforehand that he would be successful.

“If you complain about the trash content on the internet,” said one Twitter user urging people online to participate in the record-breaking class, “this is the moment to support Julioprofe.”

Source: Milenio (sp)

CORRECTION: The word Columbian may refer to a Yukon River paddlewheeler, a type of grouse or a music hall in Kansas but it was not the correct word to describe Julioprofe’s nationality. He is Colombian.

Government must comply with transparency rules to root out corruption: director

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December 8, 2020

Acuña: attacks by president have been a bitter experience.

Without transparency, the government’s quest to eliminate corruption will remain a pipe dream, warns the outgoing chief of the National Transparency Institute (INAI).

In an interview with the newspaper Milenio, Francisco Javier Acuña Llamas said President López Obrador, who has made combatting corruption the central aim of his administration, “must comply with transparency” rules to achieve his goal of a corruption-free society.

Acuña, who will step down as INAI chief on Thursday but remain an institute official for a further two years, said the president’s flagship initiatives are “strict republican austerity” and the fight against corruption.

But “without transparency and access to public information” bringing the two initiatives to fruition “could become an [unobtainable] utopia,” he said.

While López Obrador is committed to rooting out corruption, he is no fan of INAI, asserting even before he took office that it has “done nothing” and is part of a “golden bureaucracy” of underachieving yet high paid officials.

Acuña, who became INAI chief in 2017, told Milenio that being the focus of repeated attacks by the president – he took aim at the institute again on Monday – has been a difficult experience.

Indeed, he said the president’s comments have represented some of the most bitter moments of his term.

And López Obrador’s attacks have encouraged others to be critical of INAI, he said, adding: “He’s the president of the republic! There’s no stronger affront than when he hurls expressions of disapproval [at the institute] and says that we only cost [the government money] and we’re not useful. It’s terrible.”

“To withstand it you have to have a strong stomach and a lot of brains, … never respond in clumsy terms but [you have] to be firm,” he said.

Despite the attacks, Acuña said the INAI he is leaving is in good shape, describing it as “brave” institution that fulfills its duties.

It has on occasion ordered the government to release sensitive information but according to Acuña, INAI has not split from the López Obrador administration or offended it.

“On the contrary we assimilated and what [the institute] has shown is that it can do what it has to do,” he said.

It remains to be seen whether the government’s perception of INAI will change under the leadership of a new chief. For the time being, López Obrador is not showing any signs of letting up on it.

Speaking on Monday, the president said that INAI and other autonomous government bodies were created by past governments “to pretend that corruption was being combatted and that there was transparency.”

He claimed that INAI from its inception made a pact to not disclose tax reprieves granted during the 2000-2006 government of former president Vicente Fox.

Its “stellar moment,” López Obrador said sarcastically, “was when it resolved to keep secret all the Odebrecht [corruption scandal] information.”

(The Brazilian construction company has admitted to paying multi-million-dollar bribes to the previous government in exchange for lucrative contracts).

The president also railed against the high costs of funding INAI.

“How much does it cost to maintain this institute? … 1 billion pesos [US $50.5 million] a year,” López Obrador said, describing the funds allocated to it as “the people’s money.”

After accusing the officials of INAI and other autonomous institutions of living large on the public purse, the president described the organizations as floreros, or flower vases, insinuating that they are nothing more than an adornment to the real work of government.

López Obrador added that whoever is elected to succeed Acuña as INAI chief must be an honest woman or man.

Having a doctorate from a foreign university isn’t enough to get the job, he said, explaining that the successful candidate must also have “principles” and “ideals.”

Source: Milenio (sp), El Universal (sp)

Tourism makes a gradual recovery in Oaxaca, minister says

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December 8, 2020

A state official provides hand sanitizer outside the Church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca city.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of visitors to Oaxaca has been slowly recovering and so have the jobs lost to lockdowns, says state Tourism Minister Juan Carlos Rivera Castellanos.

“We have been going little by little, taking things as they come,” Rivera said. “The most important thing is that we are recovering the jobs lost throughout the tourism industry.”

But the news lately has been brighter: during Day of the Dead celebrations last month there was 30% hotel occupancy even with the state being yellow on the national coronavirus stoplight risk map. It’s a big improvement over September when hotel occupancy in Oaxaca city was only at 10% for the Independence Day holidays, a period when it would normally have been around 60%.

For the winter holiday season, Rivera is optimistically predicting 50% hotel occupancy and about 300 million pesos (US 415.16 million) in economic spillover. That number has been estimated at 86 million pesos for this year’s Day of the Dead holiday; last year the figure was 186 million.

Rivera believes the state’s efforts to gain certification as a healthy tourist destination, which he believes gives people more confidence to visit, are paying off.

In July, the World Travel and Tourism Council added the state to a growing list of tourism destinations it said had demonstrated commitment to the council’s standards of hygiene and sanitation.

But Oaxaca’s tourism industry had already been growing since 2017. In 2019, it surpassed the national average and broke all records for the state, according to Rivera. In the city of Oaxaca, from 2017–2019, average hotel occupancy increased from 30% to 50%. At the end of 2019, the city saw 15 million pesos in economic benefit from more than 5.5 million visitors.

In 2020, up until March, the state was continuing to see high numbers of visitors, he said.

“It has been earning recognition,” said Rivera, “such winner of the award for best city in Mexico and the world, according to the industry magazine Travel + Leisure. Recently we won the Oscar of tourism from the World Travel Awards 2020, as the best destination for an urban getaway.”

It’s hard to tell yet just how much income the state’s tourism industry has lost due to the pandemic. Rivera refers to the losses as “immeasurable.” But he is optimistic that December will continue the current uptick in the state’s visitor numbers and income and says it’s important not to calculate economic losses in 2020 but lives saved.

Sources: Milenio (sp), NVI Noticias (sp)

Four-day festival in Tulum blamed for spreading Covid

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December 8, 2020

Masks were in evidence at some events at the Tulum festival.

A four-day festival held in Tulum, Quintana Roo, last month has been blamed for spreading the coronavirus after many attendees, including foreign tourists, fell ill.

The third edition of the Art With Me festival, which describes itself as “a community-driven festival that combines art, music, workshops, wellness and cultural experiences,” was held in the Caribbean coast resort town from November 11 to 15.

A report by the news website The Daily Beast said Art With Me is akin to “Burning Man on the beach,” referring to the annual event that draws tens of thousands of people to the desert of northwestern Nevada for a multi-day festival.

There are “towering art installations, group meditations, and a whole lot of partying,” the report said.

This year’s Art With Me event, which transformed into an electronic music festival at night, went ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic, which as of Monday had claimed the lives of more than 110,000 people in Mexico including almost 2,000 in Quintana Roo.

The festival website contains a list of recommendations to prevent the spread of the coronavirus but numerous attendees including guests and performers told The Daily Beast that almost no one wore a mask and there was little social distancing.

Video footage of nighttime parties at hotels, restaurants and cenotes (natural sinkholes) show hundreds of maskless people dancing in close proximity to each other.

It’s unsurprising therefore that many people are believed to have contracted the virus during the event before falling ill shortly after. Positive cases stemming from the festival have been detected in both Mexico and the United States.

An administrator at the Tulum Hospital told The Daily Beast that “multiple people” with Covid who attended Art With Me have been admitted for treatment. Antonio Romero said the hospital has mainly treated tourists with Covid, saying that it typically receives two to three United States citizens per day as well as larger numbers of patients from South American countries such as Chile and Argentina.

Positive Covid cases that likely stem from Art With Me have also been detected in New York and Miami.

Eleonora Walczak, the founder of a private Covid-19 care and testing company that operates in those two cities, told The Daily Beast that most of the people she tested positive in recent weeks either attended the Tulum festival or had contact with someone who did.

“What I’ve seen in my small cohort are people testing positive after coming back from Mexico – particularly Art With Me in Tulum,” she said.

“I would say that 60-70% of my positives in the last couple weeks in New York City have been a direct result of either people coming back from Art With Me, or who have been directly exposed to someone who attended Art With Me. And I test in Miami as well, and my testers there tell me that a lot of their positives are people coming back from Art With Me.”

Be Svensden, a Danish DJ who performed at the festival, said that he subsequently became ill with Covid and heard of at least 17 other people who fell ill after attending Art With Me parties.

Xwnia Wolf, a Mexican DJ who played two cenote sets, said she hadn’t heard of anyone getting sick after attending her performances but added that she was aware of “so many cases” stemming from another cenote party.

One person who got sick was a woman The Daily Beast referred to by the alias of Michelle. She said she became so ill with Covid that she couldn’t get out of bed.

“I have nothing good to say about this event,” she said.

“They served food too — all open barbecue finger food. Everyone was grabbing with their hands,” Michelle said. “All I will say is that there was not one mask and I got more sick than I ever did in my entire life after that party.”

International visitors to Tulum, which has become a very popular destination for U.S. tourists in recent years, commonly flout health guidelines including the use of face masks even though they were made mandatory by the Quintana Roo governor early in the pandemic.

Svensden, the Danish DJ, said that plenty of carefree partying is happening in Tulum outside last month’s festival – despite a ban on large gatherings of people.

Therefore it doesn’t make sense to single out small Art With Me gatherings as superspreader events “while a whole town full of people was, and still is, partying without masks and clearly not worrying or being careful in the slightest,” he said. “Art With Me and Tulum in general should be the story.”

A representative of a digital marketing company that promotes events in Tulum told The Daily Beast that “people just ignore the fact that there is a virus around.”

“[They] wear masks just because they have to in certain places like the supermarket, and live their lives as always. This happens just in Tulum – the rest of the country seems to be taking it a little more serious. I prefer Tulum’s way.”

Source: The Daily Beast (en)

Mazatlán says no to carnival, though only 1,576 people voted

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December 8, 2020

carnaval — Mazatlán Carnival parade in 2019.

While only 0.44% of registered voters showed up to cast a ballot at a referendum Sunday, the few Mazatlán citizens who did vote decided overwhelmingly that the city will not hold its world-famous carnival celebration in February.

Local officials stood ready to collect votes with 33,000 ballots at six polling stations. But in the end, only 1,576 people voted on whether the city should hold the festival next year in light of the coronavirus. Of that number, 1,417 — or 90% — voted no.

The number of eligible voters totaled 350,510 in the 2018 elections.

The municipality held the referendum after Mayor Guillermo Benítez Torres said municipal officials could not come to a decision about holding the event, scheduled for February 11–16, due to concerns about crowding and Covid-19 spread.

“This is to say that citizens decide and not the authorities,” Benítez said upon announcing the referendum. “If you want it to happen, we are all going to share responsibility for what may happen at Carnaval.”

Mazatlán’s 2020 carnival celebration broke records with 1.6 million people attending the seven-day festival. The parade alone had an estimated attendance of 680,000. Forbes magazine has called the carnival — a 122-year-old tradition that features concerts, parades, fireworks displays and other large public events — one of the three most important carnival celebrations worldwide.

Mazatlán currently has 72 active Covid-19 cases, in second place statewide under Culiacán, which has 247.

Source: El Universal (sp)

Day at the beach turns to tragedy as 3 children swept away by waves

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December 8, 2020

The Veracruz beach where strong currents claimed the lives of three young boys.

Emergency personnel on Monday recovered the body of the last of three brothers swept away and drowned Saturday in strong currents at a Veracruz beach.

The body of 13-year-old Brayan was found washed up on a beach in the community of Las Barrancas, some distance away from where he and his two brothers disappeared in the waters off Antón Lizardo. Both are vacation towns in the municipality of Alvarado, located within the metropolitan area of the city of Veracruz.

The boys had been swimming with their family Saturday around noon near a breakwater when strong currents began pulling the boys, their father and an adult sister. Alvarado Civil Protection personnel enlisted the help of lifeguards and fishermen in the area to save the father and the sister, but the three boys disappeared in the waves.

The father was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

With the continued help of fishermen, officials located 10-year-old Alexander’s body in the vicinity the same day around 4 p.m, and 15-year-old Uriel’s body on Sunday by a breakwater near the Antón Lizardo Naval School.

The family, from Tlaxcala, were swimming despite red flags posted at the beach warning of the dangerous conditions. Waves at the beach this weekend were bigger than usual due to the combination of northern winds and a cold front passing through the area.

Sources: Milenio (sp), ADN40 (sp)

Healthcare workers then seniors are first in line in 5-stage Covid vaccination plan

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December 8, 2020

The first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine is expected this month.

Healthcare workers will be the first people in Mexico to be immunized against Covid-19 under a five-stage national vaccination plan presented Tuesday by the federal government.

Second in line are people aged 80 and over followed by those in the 70-79 age bracket.

Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, the government’s coronavirus point man, told President López Obrador’s morning news conference that the intention is to administer Covid-19 vaccines to about 75% of the population aged 16 and over by the end of next year.

According to the vaccination plan, the immunization of frontline healthcare workers using the Pfizer vaccine will begin this month and conclude in February 2021.

Health Minister Jorge Alcocer said Monday that people considered particularly vulnerable to a serious Covid-19 illness due to existing health conditions will also have early access to immunization.

The Pfizer vaccine is expected to be approved by the health regulator Cofepris this month and a first shipment of 250,000 doses is to arrive soon after. That number of doses will allow 125,000 healthcare workers to be inoculated as each person requires two shots given 21 days apart.

Mexico struck a deal with Pfizer last week to buy 34.4 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, which was shown to be 95% effective in phase 3 trials. One million doses are slated to arrive in Mexico in each of January, February and March and a shipment of 12 million doses is expected in April.

In stage 2 of the vaccination plan, which will run from February to April, the government intends to immunize non-frontline health workers and people aged over 60, starting with those 80 or older. Immunization of people aged 50-59 will occur in stage 3 in April and May while those between 40 and 49 are to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in stage 4 next May and June.

In stage 5, the rest of the population will be immunized between June 2021 and March 2022.

López-Gatell said the vaccination schedule creates “new horizons of hope” for Mexico and the world.

“We’ll be working throughout 2021 as the different vaccines appear,” he said, adding that the government already has agreements to purchase three.

Foreign Minister Ebrard: having early access to vaccine is ‘a great achievement’ for Mexico.

The deputy health minister predicted that more vaccines will be approved in 2021, providing the opportunity to purchase additional shipments from different suppliers.

Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard noted that the government has an agreement to purchase 77.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine, adding that it will sign a deal this week to buy 35 million doses of China’s CanSino Biologics vaccine.

Phase 3 trials of the CanSino vaccine and four other Covid-19 vaccines are currently taking place in Mexico, he said.

“In a nutshell, we have access to the vaccine,” the foreign minister said. “It will be up to us to approve [each one] or not. We have guaranteed and signed access.”

Cofepris’ approval of the Pfizer vaccine is expected to be facilitated by its likely imminent authorization by the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. The rollout of the vaccine began in the United Kingdom on Tuesday.

In Mexico, the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine could be administered to health workers in Mexico City and Coahuila as soon as next week. That Mexico will be one of the first countries in the world to inoculate people against Covid-19 is “a great achievement,” Ebrard said.

Mexico has been one of the worst affected countries by the coronavirus pandemic, currently ranking 12th for confirmed cases and fourth for Covid-19 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The accumulated case tally increased to 1,182,249 on Monday with 6,399 new cases reported while the official death toll rose to 110,074 with 357 additional fatalities.

Source: Infobae (sp), Milenio (sp)

Judge grants Maya Train suspension order on environmental grounds

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December 8, 2020