Mexican driver Chico Pérez: coronavirus situation is complicated.
The 2020 Mexican Grand Prix Formula 1 auto race will be postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, officials announced today, calling the health crisis a force majeure.
Those who have already purchased their tickets for the race — 60% had already been sold — will be reimbursed or can elect to use them next year at the event’s home track, the Hermanos Rodríguez speedway in Mexico City. Last year’s Grand Prix drew 345,694 fans.
The race, which was first held in 1962, is sanctioned by the International Automobile Association and is an official Formula 1 event.
Formula 1 has decided to eliminate the entire Americas tour. Canada was the first to announce that it would not hold a race this year, followed by Mexico, the United States and Brazil.
In a statement, Formula 1 said the decision was “due to the fluid nature of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, local restrictions and the importance of keeping communities and our colleagues safe.”
Race organizers had considered holding the Grand Prix without fans in attendance but felt it wouldn’t be fair to racing aficionados.
Drivers are disappointed but seem to be taking the news in stride. Mexican driver Sergio “Checo” Pérez posted a message to social media when he heard the news.
“It hurts for the fans, for the organization and for my whole country, because it is always a great opportunity to show how great we are. I know they support me with every lap I take and I hope I can give them a lot of satisfaction the rest of the year,” Pérez said. “This is also an example of how complicated the pandemic situation in Mexico is,” he added, while reminding people to follow coronavirus protocols.
In return, Formula 1 added three races to its European racing calendar in Germany, Portugal and Italy.
Another patient is wheeled into a Mexico City hospital.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that Mexico City will remain at the orange alert level due to a growing demand for hospital beds and fears that there could be a resurgence of coronavirus cases.
The city remains at the second-highest risk level due to the increase in the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients during the last five days, Sheinbaum explained.
“We call on all the inhabitants of Mexico City to protect themselves,” she cautioned, adding that safe distance measures and the use of face masks must continue.
Currently, 2,674 people with the coronavirus in Mexico City are in hospital, and 774 are on ventilators.
If the number of hospitalized patients with coronavirus reaches 5,000 in the Valley of México, the city will revert to the red light, or maximum risk level.
“According to the epidemiological stoplight of the Ministry of Health, if occupancy increases to more than 5,127 beds, we would need to be taking more restrictive measures and have to return to a red light and stay like that for several weeks so that we can drop the level of hospitalization in the city,” Sheinbaum warned.
Not changing the trend of the virus could lead to exponential growth and a return to maximum-risk restrictions by October.
Permitted activities will remain unchanged next week, although businesses in the city’s historic center, where the largest crowds of people have been seen, will close at 5 p.m. instead of 6 p.m. and will be closely monitored for compliance.
As of Friday, officials said, there have been 66,444 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Mexico City and 8,638 deaths. Active cases currently number 4,638.
Videgaray, left, Peña Nieto, center, and Lozoya with members of the campaign team in 2012.
The Brazilian company Odebrecht funded the 2012 political campaign of former president Enrique Peña Nieto to the tune of US $4 million and gave another $6 million to his government after he took office, according to former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya.
The newspaper Reforma reported Friday that Lozoya, extradited to Mexico by Spain last week to face corruption charges, told the federal government about the payments before his extradition.
In a document submitted to the government and seen by the newspaper, Lozoya said the $4-million payment was used to pay foreign consultants who provided electoral advice to Peña Nieto’s campaign in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election.
The ex-Pemex chief alleged that Luis Videgaray, Peña Nieto’s campaign manager, hired the foreign consultants. Videgaray later went on to serve as finance minister and foreign affairs minister in the 2012-18 federal government
Lozoya said Odebrecht also made a $6-million payment while Peña Nieto was president in exchange for a 3-billion-peso ($135 million at today’s exchange rate) contract for work on the state oil company refinery in Tula, Hidalgo.
Part of that money was used to pay bribes to opposition party lawmakers to ensure that the former government’s energy reform passed Congress, the former official said.
In his report to the current government, Lozoya said that while working on Peña Nieto’s campaign he attended a meeting with Odebrecht’s then Mexico chief Luis Alberto Meneses Weyll at a bakery/cafe in the upscale Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec.
He said he met with Meneses on the orders of Videgaray, who instructed him to negotiate resources to cover the expenses of hiring the foreign consultants.
Lozoya said that Meneses, a Brazilian national, committed to giving Peña Nieto’s campaign $4 million and that the majority of that amount – $3.15 million – was deposited into an account of an offshore company called Latin America Asia Capital Holding.
The former Pemex CEO said he told both Videgaray and Peña Nieto that Odebrecht had deposited the funds into the account.
Lozoya said that Odebrecht – which has been embroiled in corruption scandals in several Latin American countries – transferred the $6 million to Fabiola Tapia Vargas, administrator of Construcciones Industriales Tapia, a company that collaborated with the Brazilian firm on the work at the Tula refinery.
Peña Nieto, left, and Videgaray, right, accepted cash from Odebrecht according to Lozoya.
Lozoya said that Tapia, who died in May 2014, gave him a bank card for the account into which the $6 million was deposited. He said the directive he received was to make the funds available to the federal government.
Lozoya said that just under 52.4 million pesos ($2.4 million today) was used to pay bribes to National Action Party (PAN) legislators in exchange for their support for the former government’s 2013 energy reform and other initiatives.
He said that bribes were paid to the lawmakers at an office in Lomas de Chapultepec by David Penchyna, a former Institutional Revolutionary Party senator and president of the upper house’s energy committee.
Lozoya says that Peña Nieto and then finance minister Videgaray directly led the bribery scheme.
The ex-official also said that Videgaray personally asked him to arrange a 6.8-million-peso payment to Ricardo Anaya, a former federal deputy who later became the PAN’s national president and the party’s candidate in the 2018 presidential election. Anaya allegedly received the money in August 2014.
Among the other legislators who allegedly received bribes paid with the Odebrecht funds are current governors Francisco Domínguez of Querétaro and Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca of Tamaulipas.
Lozoya provided information to the federal Attorney General’s Office about the Odebrecht bribes, and has agreed to collaborate with it more widely, in the hope that he will receive a reduced sentence for his role.
He is accused of money laundering, criminal association and involvement in bribery. In addition to alleged wrongdoing in relation to the Odebrecht case, Lozoya is accused of benefiting from the 2015 purchase by Pemex of a rundown fertilizer plant in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, at an allegedly vastly inflated price.
He was arrested in Spain in February and brought to Mexico last Thursday aboard a government plane. He was immediately transferred to a private hospital to be treated for anemia and an esophagus problem.
He said the information provided by the former state oil company chief “will be of great public utility because it will help to banish corruption.”
Lozoya is the second high-ranking member of the Peña Nieto government to be taken into custody on corruption charges after former cabinet minister Rosario Robles, who allegedly participated in the embezzlement scheme known as the “Master Fraud.”
The five marble statues in the Nuevo León municipality of San Pedro Garza García, known as Los Gigantes, donned face masks this week.
Hospital occupancy is at “alarming levels” in seven of eight Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) hospitals in Nuevo León due to increased admissions of coronavirus patients, Governor Jaime Rodríguez Calderón said Thursday.
Rodríguez told a virtual meeting with the state’s mayors that occupancy levels are between 74% and 91% in the IMSS facilities. He also said that private hospitals in the northern border state have a shortage of ventilators.
Data presented by the federal Health Ministry at Thursday night’s coronavirus press briefing showed that 78% of general care hospital beds set aside for coronavirus patients in Nuevo León are currently occupied while 55% of those with ventilators are in use.
Nuevo León has the equal highest occupancy rate for general care beds among Mexico’s 32 states and the third highest rate for beds with ventilators, according to the data.
Rodríguez, a former presidential candidate widely known as “El Bronco,” said that some private hospitals have occupancy rates above 90% and that an average of 63% of beds are filled in those operated by the State Workers Social Security Institute and the army.
Governor Rodríguez, center, says mobility needs to be reduced to control virus.
Nuevo León Health Minister Manuel de la O Cavazos said 1,341 coronavirus patients are currently hospitalized and that 44 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the previous 24 hours, the state’s highest single-day total.
The state government has recorded a total of 26,856 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 899 deaths but the federal Health Ministry is currently reporting only half that number of cases and 820 fatalities.
Federal authorities estimate there are currently 3,920 active coronavirus cases in Nuevo León, the third highest total in the country after Mexico City and México state.
Given the recent increase in case numbers, no date has yet been set for the start of the new school year, Rodríguez said, adding that classes will mostly likely be held online until the end of the year.
“We’re not going to start the school year while we don’t have the conditions [to do so],” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to open schools this year, it will be difficult.”
De la O told the mayors that three of the 10 indicators on Nuevo León’s “stoplight” system, used to determine which restrictions can be eased, are currently red.
The average number of new cases reported daily, the state’s coronavirus reproduction rate and the average number of daily Covid-19 deaths are the main causes of concern.
De la O said that if one more indicator switches to red, tighter economic restrictions will be reimplemented.
“I’m angry because we can do more as a society [to stop the spread of the coronavirus],” he said.
The health minister said that some people have downplayed the importance of the mitigation measures and are leaving their homes to carry out nonessential activities.
Later on Thursday, Governor Rodríguez said on Twitter that he will order nonessential businesses to close if a fourth coronavirus indicator turns red.
“We still have three indicators on red, four on orange and three on green. As a result, we’ll continue as we were: we won’t open anything else and we won’t close anything. However, if we happen to have another indicator in red, we will have to close stores and services,” he wrote.
“We have to be stricter [in the observance of health recommendations]. Our health system is strong but our heroes are tired. We have to keep the spread of the virus under control. If we reduce mobility to the maximum, … we’ll soon be better off in terms of infections and hospitalizations and with that we’ll give our doctors a rest.”
The world’s largest “roll-on/roll-off” cargo ship designed specifically for carrying wheeled merchandise such as cars docked at the port of Veracruz Wednesday in the first leg of its maiden voyage.
Commissioned by Volkswagen, the Siem Confucius relies exclusively on liquefied natural gas (LNG) for fuel. LNG-powered vessels produce 25% fewer carbon dioxide and 100% fewer sulfur dioxide emissions.
The Siem Confucius and its sister ship, the Siem Aristotle, measure 200 meters long by 38 meters wide and have 13 car decks, meaning they can carry about 7,500 cars each when fully loaded.
Kenneth Ross, CEO of Siem Car Carriers which built the ships, calls them the most innovative, efficient and environmentally-friendly ships in the world. “If you look at everything from their optimized design, speed reduction, the shape of the bow, even the quality of the paint – it’s a genuine breakthrough,” Ross says.
Miguel Ángel Yáñez Monroy, director of the port of Veracruz, said the Siem Confucius offloaded 357 Audi, Volkswagen, Seat, Porsche and Bentley models from Europe and loaded 3,050 Volkswagen and 2,350 Audi vehicles produced in Puebla. They were bound for Germany after stops in the United Stated and Canada as part of its “America Round Tour” route.
The vessel, which sails at an average of 16.5 knots in “eco-mode” and 19 knots in full-service mode, left the port of Emden, Germany, on June 16, docking in Mexico on July 22.
The port of Veracruz moves about 1 million cars per year, Yáñez said, although the coronavirus has disrupted vehicle movements and demand has collapsed.
The arrival of the Siem Confucius is a positive sign for the reactivation of the economy, he said, highlighting that the arrival of the ship indicates that, at least for the automotive industry, things are getting back to normal.
The services and retail sector, which employs more than half of all workers, declined 3.2%.
The coronavirus pandemic and associated restrictions ravaged Mexico’s economy in May, new data shows.
The national statistics institute Inegi reported Friday that economic activity declined 21.6% in May compared to the same month of 2019. The contraction was the worst year-over-year decline since comparable economic records were first kept in 1993.
May was the second full month in which nationwide coronavirus restrictions were in force. The economic slump in the fifth month of the year followed a 19.67% annual contraction in April.
Activity in the tertiary sector of the economy, which includes services and retail, declined 3.2% in May compared to the previous month, Inegi said. The result will have a significant impact on Mexico’s overall economic performance this year as the tertiary sector contributes to about 65% of Mexico’s GDP and employs more than half of all Mexican workers.
Secondary activities, including manufacturing, mining and construction, fell 1.8%, Inegi said.
The only bright spot was that the primary sector, which includes farming and fishing, grew 1.6%.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients that the federal government’s “underwhelming” fiscal response to the coronavirus crisis does not bode well for a strong economic recovery in the short term.
“The weak fiscal policy response to the pandemic … is likely to lead to a deeper contraction and a shallower recovery.”
Mexico’s poorest municipality, Santos Reyes Yucuná, Oaxaca, reported its first confirmed case of the coronavirus on July 17, four months after the pandemic reached Mexico.
The virus took longer to find its way to this remote, Mixtec community located 217 kilometers from the state’s capital due to its lack of infrastructure, especially roads.
The social development agency Coneval estimates that 99.9% of the municipality’s population of 1,380 lives in poverty, most at extreme levels. There is no hospital in the area, and most residents do not have government health insurance or the means to travel to a hospital in another city, should they fall ill.
Another town in Oaxaca’s Mixteca region, Coicoyán de las Flores, is in a similar situation with much the same levels of poverty. One case of the coronavirus was reported last month and the patient, a 25-year-old woman, died.
Last weekend, 23 new cases of Covid-19 were registered in the Mixteca region, for a total of 482 positive cases and at least 48 reported deaths. The area’s municipal seat, Huajuapan, has the highest number of cases at 30, with three people hospitalized.
[wpgmza id=”8″]
Earlier this week the mayor of Santos Reyes Yucuná, Sergio Francisco Amado Aja, asked Oaxaca Health Services (SSO) and the state governor to assign medical and nursing personnel and send medications and medical supplies to the town’s clinic.
“In this rainy season, there are times when children or people get sick with the flu, but it might be confused with another type of illness or Covid-19. That’s why we are asking for doctors at the clinic so that people do not have to be moved to the city of Huajuapan,” he said. “We do not have public transportation, and apart from that there is no money for transportation, and receiving care in Huajuapan is very expensive.”
Jalisco is one of the states where more extensive Covid testing has been conducted.
The federal Health Ministry reported a single-day record of 8,438 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, lifting Mexico’s accumulated case tally to 370,712.
It was the first time that more than 8,000 additional cases were reported since the coronavirus was first detected in Mexico almost five months ago. Thursday’s tally exceeded the previous single-day record of 7,615 cases by 11%.
The Health Ministry also reported 718 additional Covid-19 fatalities, lifting Mexico’s death toll to 41,908.
Almost 9% of the total confirmed cases – 31,995 – are currently active, according to federal data, while there are also 89,547 suspected cases.
Based on past positivity rates, the Health Ministry estimates that Mexico’s accumulated case tally is 413,074 and that active cases total 53,349.
Estimated active coronavirus cases, according to the Ministry of Health. milenio
National data presented at Thursday night’s coronavirus press briefing showed that 47% of general care hospital beds set aside for coronavirus patients are currently occupied while 38% of those with ventilators are in use.
Speaking at the news conference, the director of the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control Programs said that the coronavirus pandemic has taken a heavy toll on Mexico because it arrived in a “sick country.”
Citing almost 150,000 deaths in 2018 due to heart disease and more than 100,000 caused by diabetes, Ruy López Ridaura said the health situation in Mexico needs to change but acknowledged that it won’t happen overnight.
He said that 86% of people who have lost their lives to Covid-19 in Mexico had at least one identified existing health problem, the most common being diabetes, hypertension, obesity and heart disease.
López said that 28% of those who have died had one identified comorbidity, 26% had two underlying health conditions and 32% had three or more chronic problems.
The number of people who have been infected with the coronavirus is undoubtedly much higher due to Mexico’s low testing rates.
The daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths. Deaths are numbers reported and not necessarily those that occurred each day. milenio
He asserted on June 10 that widespread testing would not lead to improved control of the coronavirus pandemic.
“There is no technical, scientific or logical connection between the number of tests and control success. It all depends on how the tests are used, with what objective, at what time, which people [are tested] and most importantly what decision stems from a test. I could test everyone every day and it wouldn’t lead to epidemiological control,” López-Gatell said.
The newspaper El Universal reported on Friday that the federal government has asked authorities in Mexico’s 32 states to test only 10% of people with coronavirus symptoms, although at least eight states have ignored the advice.
Authorities in Aguascalientes, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Querétaro, México state, Morelos, Nuevo León and Mexico City are using their own resources to perform more tests than the number advised by the federal Health Ministry, state government sources told El Universal.
Mexico City Health Minister Oliva López Arellano acknowledged in an interview with El Universal that authorities took the decision to increase testing beyond the 10% level that the federal government recommends.
She said that testing helps authorities “identify chains of infection” and “cut” them.
Officials from several other states also spoke of the benefits of testing widely, highlighting that the identification of asymptomatic cases is particularly helpful to curbing transmission of the coronavirus.
In Jalisco, Governor Enrique Alfaro has implemented his own testing regime in collaboration with state-run and private laboratories that identifies coronavirus cases via both gold standard PCR tests and rapid tests.
Authorities in the western state have made significant efforts to test health workers as well as people with mild coronavirus symptoms and their close contacts.
A total of 24,635 coronavirus cases have been identified in Jalisco, according to state government data, yet federal authorities have only reported 11,473 because they don’t include rapid testing data or the results of tests from private labs in official statistics.
Similarly, Nuevo León government data shows that 26,856 people have tested positive for Covid-19 yet federal authorities are currently reporting that there are 13,720 confirmed cases in the northern state.
Nuevo León has the eighth highest coronavirus tally among Mexico’s states, according to federal data, and Jalisco has the 12th highest. However, the states would rank third and fourth, respectively, if the federal Health Ministry accepted and reported all of their data.
“We decided to do a significant number of tests in order to diagnose and isolate patients in a timely manner,” said Nuevo León Health Minister Manuel de la O Cavazos.
In his state – where authorities are reporting coronavirus data from private laboratories and hospitals as well as health facilities that are not accredited by the federal Institute of Epidemiological Diagnosis and Reference – the number of tests being performed is in accordance with international standards for “a pandemic of this type,” the health minister said.
“We’re reporting double the cases that the federal government reports [for Nuevo León] and we’re going to keep doing it because it’s the right way to do things. It’s about human lives.”
The state of Guanajuato will file a complaint against the Pemex refinery in Salamanca after it emitted large plumes of yellow smoke Thursday morning, alarming residents.
Shortly after 9 a.m., residents of the city’s Granjas and Belavista neighborhoods alerted authorities to the presence of the oddly-colored, dense smoke.
Police, environmental officials and Civil Protection went to the plant where personnel explained that an error in the start-up process had caused the release of steam mixed with diesel fuel.
Residents were told by Civil Protection to close their doors and windows and avoid going outside for an hour in order to safeguard their health. Air quality was affected, but not enough to raise a health alert.
The refinery’s managers did not respond to inquiries about the nature of the smoke on Thursday, which frustrated environmental authorities.
The Salamanca refinery and its yellow emission on Thursday.
“There has been no response or direct communication from those responsible for the refinery, regarding its internal processes, [which] hinders the implementation of preventive actions by Civil Protection and the Ministry of Health,” said state Environment Minister María Isabel Ortiz Mantilla.
Ortiz noted that it was not an isolated event. Two similar emissions have occurred in the past week in at the refineries in Salamanca and Cadereyta, Nuevo León.
Ortiz announced that her ministry will work with refineries to improve communication and minimize risk to the public should another incident occur.
Five of Mexico’s six Pemex refineries are among the 25 top polluters in the world for sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions, according to monitoring by NASA satellites in 2018.
Refineries in Tula, Hidalgo, and Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, are ranked fourth and fifth place, whereas the Salamanca refinery came in at 19th place out of the world’s 700 oil refineries.
The tlayuda, a Oaxacan dish made with a large tortilla filled with refried beans, cheese and meat, has been crowned the best street food in Latin America among Twitter users who voted in a poll by the Netflix streaming service.
The contest was part of a promotional campaign coinciding with the July 21 launch of the Netflix series Street Food: Latin America, which takes viewers on a gastronomical tour of six countries, exploring their cultures through traditional dishes.
The tlayuda went up against choripán (Buenos Aires, Argentina), acarajé (Salvador, Brazil), ajiaco (Bogotá, Colombia), ceviche (Lima, Peru), and stuffed potato balls (La Paz, Bolivia).
Only the tlayuda, ceviche — fish cured in lime juice — and choripán — a dish made of grilled chorizo and bread — made it to the semifinals of the 24-hour contest.
While the tlayuda trailed ceviche at noon yesterday, it managed to rally and win the competition with 46.8% of the vote, and was declared the winner shortly after 7 p.m..
Ceviche came in second with 45.3%, and choripán was the favorite of just 7.9% of the 802,095 people who participated.
The Mexican government, the governor of Oaxaca and the United States Ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, all urged their Twitter followers to cast their votes for the Mexican entry, and when the news broke that the tlayuda had won broke, social media was flooded with celebratory memes.
What makes the tlayuda so special? Chef and culinary historian Rodrigo Llanes told the newspaper El País that the tlayuda is a bridge between pre-Hispanic and European culture, calling it a “magical” culinary creation.
“I do not disqualify the other candidates, but I maintain my preference for the Oaxacan entry for its historical tradition that does justice to native peoples, for its flavor that is emblematic of mestizo gourmandise, and for its size, which makes it a dish to share,” he said.
