As the country braces itself for the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak in the coming weeks, the Mexico City government has added a section to its app that informs users of hospital locations and real-time conditions.
By keeping citizens informed of hospital activity, authorities in the capital and México state hope to avoid panic and hospital saturation.
The App CDMX is available for both Apple and Android phones. Those who already have it downloaded should update it to make sure that the new hospital feature is working properly.
In the Hospitals section, users can get access to the GPS location of the hospital treating Covid-19 patients nearest to them, as well as its current availability, listed as either high, medium or low.
But the app isn’t the only place for citizens to find hospital information. The interactive map can also be found on the city’s website.
The city has also set up a text messaging system to provide support to those who fear they may be infected. By texting “covid19” to the toll-free number 51515, possible victims can receive a questionnaire to evaluate their case and see if they need further attention for the disease.
The questionnaire can also be downloaded here — and is available in English, as well — or requested via a direct message to the city’s Facebook account.
ECLAC's Bárcena: a sharp increase in unemployment is forecast.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the financial institution Citibanamex have both downgraded their forecasts for the Mexican economy this year as the coronavirus pandemic worsens.
ECLAC executive secretary Alicia Bárcena said on Tuesday that the commission is predicting that GDP will shrink by 6.5% in Mexico this year. The commission forecast on April 3 that the contraction would be between 3.8% and 6%.
ECLAC is predicting that the coronavirus pandemic will cause GDP across Latin America and the Caribbean to fall by 5.3%, which would be the biggest recession the region has ever suffered.
In 1914, the first year of World War I, GDP declined by 4.9% while in 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression, the region’s economy contracted by 5%.
“A sharp increase in unemployment is forecast, with negative effects on poverty and inequality,” Bárcena said.
ECLAC said in a press release that Mexico will suffer the impact of a deceleration in the United States’ economy in 2020 and be hit by the decline in oil prices.
Meanwhile, Citibanamax is now predicting that the Mexican economy will shrink by 9% this year. Its previous forecast was a 5.1% contraction.
The bank said that without fiscal support from the government, the economy could contract by as much as 10.5% as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the measures put in place to limit the spread of the disease. However, Citibanamex predicted that the severity of the recession will force the government to change its attitude on the provision of fiscal support.
In addition to its bleak growth outlook, Citibanamex estimated that exports will decline 18% this year, personal consumption will fall 11.5% and investment will drop 19.7%.
It also predicted that the economic contraction will push down inflation to a year-end rate of 3% from 3.4% at the end of 2019.
A note from David to his family outside the hospital where he is a Covid-19 patient.
Coronavirus patients at a government hospital in Mexico City are finding ways to communicate with their loved ones despite being in isolation, the newspaper Milenio reports.
Their messages, ranging from the practical to the sentimental, are transcribed by doctors and nurses on a piece of paper and then taped to windows of the hospital’s first floor. There, social workers take photos of the messages and share them with the patients’ families, many of which wait outside the hospital each day, hoping for information or the possibility of a visit.
One patient, Maribel, reminded relatives to feed the dog, pay credit card and utility bills and put gas in the car. She also told her family she loves them and regrets not being able to say goodbye because everything happened so fast.
Francisco López was admitted to the hospital 10 days ago with atypical pneumonia. His son, Jorge, does not know if he has been diagnosed with the coronavirus, but through messages, they are told he is stable. “I only know that he is alive because of the message the nurse gave me,” Jorge says.
In the message, Francisco tells his children he loves them, and not to worry because he has “been through worse.”
“We answered the message, on a little paper note that goes inside a plastic bag,” Jorge said. “We told him that we are here, that we miss him. We also sent him a bottle of water.”
María García also communicates with her husband Julián through daily messages and sends care packages containing soap, towels, sandals and shampoo. She includes notes telling him she loves him and that he will be able to come home soon.
But still, she’s anxious and wants to see him, arriving at the hospital every afternoon hoping one of the police officers guarding the door will let her in. It hasn’t happened. “They don’t want us to risk getting sick, too,” she concedes.
Currently, Mexico is in phase three of the pandemic, with 8,261 cases of the coronavirus and 686 deaths.
'Exchange for food,' reads street vendor Margarita's sign in Los Cabos.
Without tourists to sustain the normally thriving informal economy in Baja California Sur, street vendors in Los Cabos have resorted to bartering directly for food in order to survive.
Such vendors commonly earn just enough for them and their families to get by day to day and do not have the option to wait out the Covid-19 pandemic in home isolation.
“I need food in order to feed my children, that’s why I’m exchanging my hats for food,” said Margarita, a street vendor originally from Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. She supports her family by selling woven sunhats from Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla.
But sales dropped to zero after the coronavirus pandemic similarly tanked the local tourist economy.
Having had little success bartering her hats, Margarita said that she, her husband and their four children are currently getting by thanks to the charity of people who want to help.
“Really, I’m not gonna wear the hat, but out of solidarity I exchanged a few stewed dishes for two of her hats. It’s preferable to her having to turn to crime,” said a woman who traded with Margarita.
The immediate future does not look bright for Margarita or anyone else in the state who depends on visitors to make a living. State Tourism Minister Luis Humberto Araiza López said he expects the pandemic to cost the region tens of billions of pesos in revenue.
“… we’re expecting a 10-point loss in the tourism gross domestic product at the national level, in Baja California Sur this will mean a drop of 20 billion pesos (US $819 million),” he said, adding that the loss at the national level is expected to total around US $10 billion.
The vendors in Los Cabos aren’t the only ones in the country who have had to adapt to the caprice of the Covid-19 pandemic. Street merchants from Acapulco to Cuernavaca to Mazatlán have been changing out their normal products for face masks in order to meet demand and be able to get by.
Baja California has requested that the federal government install health screening checkpoints at the state’s international border crossings in order to detect possible cases of Covid-19 coming into Mexico.
State Congress president Luis Moreno asked federal Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard to install screening checkpoints on the border to locate and isolate people “who continue to import the virus to Baja California border towns.”
State Health Minister Alonso Pérez Rico said that the virus was brought to the state by people entering from its neighbor to the north.
“We have detected cases [imported] from the United States of people who cross the border into Baja California after testing positive for Covid-19 in order to be treated in the state’s health centers, because they don’t have health insurance in their country or because of the high cost of treatment in California,” said Pérez.
Baja California authorities said the decision by the federal Health Ministry not to set up border control mechanisms in recent weeks has allowed many patients to enter the state, despite U.S. restrictions on Mexicans entering the country during the pandemic.
The pandemic has significantly decreased transborder traffic, where some media reports have cited crossings as much as 70-90% lower than normal. But considering that the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing is the world’s busiest, there are still many opportunities for the virus to cross into Baja California.
Pérez and other officials fear that the situation could cause a resurgence of the outbreak in the state, which currently occupies third place in the number of confirmed cases in the country.
Baja California authorities closed the state’s beaches in late March to prevent the spread of the virus, but the lack of controls at the border appears to have fueled the outbreak, especially in Tijuana.
The Guerrero family that was prevented from returning to their home.
With more than 220 communities across 10 states in Mexico closing their borders to outsiders due to fear of the coronavirus, even some returning residents are being turned away.
Such was the case for a woman in Guerrero who traveled from her hometown of Marquelia to seek medical treatment for her infant daughter in Mexico City and was not allowed to return home.
Lizeth Ariana Camacho and her husband and three children left the town of about 12,000 in March because their 3-month-old daughter needed heart surgery in the nation’s capital, where rates of infection are more than four times higher than the national average.
The family was stopped at a coronavirus checkpoint upon trying to return to the town, where Ariana says they were treated like “dogs,” and asked to self-quarantine elsewhere for 14 days before they would be allowed to go home.
Ariana says she tried to reason with town officials, saying the hospital would have never released her baby daughter to the family if they were infected, but the townspeople weren’t budging on their decision.
They first took refuge in a school then, with all three kids and suitcases in tow, Camacho said via Facebook posts, the family was made to walk for more than an hour along the beach under the hot sun to reach a family member’s home which was under construction and had no electricity or clean water. Later, a woman who runs a hostel let them stay in one of her rooms and gave them food.
The president of Guerrero’s Human Rights Commission, Ramón Navarrete Magdaleno, said that his organization would be looking into the situation as a possible violation of the family’s human rights.
Guerrero currently has 129 positive cases of the coronavirus and 14 people have died.
The price of Mexico’s export crude fell into negative territory for the first time ever on Monday as demand for oil remains low due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The state oil company Pemex reported that a barrel of crude fell to US -$2.37 per barrel, a decline of 116% compared to Friday’s closing price of $14.35.
The descent into negative territory came as the West Texas Intermediate Price, the main United States benchmark to which the Mexican crude price is tied, fell to more than $30 below zero.
The prices went negative partially as a result of the way oil is traded. Futures contracts in the United States requiring purchasers to take possession of oil in May expire today but most refineries don’t currently want crude because demand is so low and they don’t have anywhere to store it.
With nowhere to store oil themselves, some speculators paid buyers to take it off their hands.
“If you are a producer, your market has disappeared, and if you don’t have access to storage you are out of luck,” said Aaron Brady, vice president for energy oil market services at the consulting firm IHS Markit. “The system is seizing up.”
Monday’s price plunge is the latest bad news for Pemex, which saw its credit rating downgraded by both Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service last week.
With global oil prices having already fallen this year due to collapsing demand due to the coronavirus crisis and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, Mexico’s revenue from oil exports has already dropped sharply and now looks set to decline even further.
Carlos Huerta, an energy sector consultant and former political economy advisor at Pemex, said that the oil market had reacted to “what will very probably be one of the most severe economic crises of the last 100 years.”
“The high correlation between the energy sector and economic growth … indicates that the economic paralysis will be brutal,” he said.
In that context, the Mexican government needs to increase spending to support the economy, Huerta said, asserting that it should inject resources into productive sectors, broaden social programs, support small and medium-sized businesses and make unemployment benefits widely available.
“If the health maxim is ‘stay at home,’ the economic maxim of the Mexican state must be ‘spend,’” he said.
Not even the coronavirus pandemic has put a dent in Mexico’s alarmingly high homicide rate: March was the most violent month since President López Obrador took office in December 2018, official statistics show.
The National Public Security System reported on Monday that there were 3,000 homicide victims last month, the highest number since July 2018 when 3,074 people were murdered.
The March numbers constitute the second highest monthly total since former president Felipe Calderón was sworn in on December 1, 2006. The number of victims last month is 8.5% higher than February and 5.1% higher than March 2019.
Once again, Guanajuato had the highest number of homicide victims in March with 353 followed by México state, Chihuahua, Baja California and Michoacán, where 286, 247, 243 and 213 people, respectively, were murdered.
The other five states among the 10 most violent in March were, in order, Jalisco, Guerrero, Mexico City, Veracruz and Sonora.
With best wishes from the Gulf Cartel.
Yucatán and Baja California Sur were the least violent, with just two homicide victims each. Eight people were murdered in each of Campeche and Aguascalientes last month while there were 10 victims in Nayarit.
Domestic violence offenses also increased as people spent more time in their homes to help limit the spread of Covid-19. More than 20,300 cases were reported in March, a 13.7% increase compared to February.
Minor drug trafficking offenses, human trafficking and muggings all increased compared to February but femicides, kidnappings, extortion, vehicle theft and burglaries all declined.
The high levels of violence seen in March have shown only limited signs of abating in April even though a health emergency stipulating the suspension of all nonessential activities has been in effect since the start of the month. An average of 97 people per day were murdered last month while in the first 19 days of April there was an average of 84 homicide victims per day, according to preliminary government statistics.
The past two days were the two most violent of the year with a total of 219 homicide victims. The government reported 105 victims on Sunday but the 2020-high only stood for a day before the murders of 114 people were reported on Monday.
Guanajuato, where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the San Rosa de Lima Cartel are engaged in a bloody turf war, was the most violent state in the country on Monday with 16 homicides. México state recorded the highest number of murders on Sunday with 12.
President urges killers to think of the suffering they have caused.
“We’re dealing with the coronavirus [pandemic] but unfortunately we’re still having problems with homicides. They haven’t even calmed down because of the coronavirus situation; don’t come along now and say ‘we’re handing out groceries,’ stop [the violence]! Think of your families and yourselves. Those who dedicate themselves to these [criminal] activities, if you’re listening to me or watching me, you have to have love for life, it’s the most sublime thing, a blessing,” he said.
“Handing out groceries doesn’t help, what helps is stopping bad deeds, loving your neighbor, not causing harm to anyone. … Think of your families, especially your mothers, the suffering that you cause them, the suffering of the victims’ families,” López Obrador said.
The president reiterated that his administration is committed to providing alternatives for people involved in crime so that they can “be happy again with their families, have a job and not be forced to do harm.”
He has consistently pledged to reduce violence by addressing its root causes rather than combating it with force.
The wreckage of a vehicle after weekend clashes in Guerrero.
It’s not the coronavirus that is killing people in the mountains of Guerrero, it’s violent gun battles between community vigilantes, police and soldiers and the Cartel del Sur.
Clashes over the weekend in El Naranjo, an agricultural town where poppies grown for opium gum and heroin are a big crop, left burnt-out cars and 13 dead in another wave of extreme violence that has been plaguing the region for years.
Residents say the latest attack began Saturday morning with a gun battle that lasted for hours, punctuated from time to time by the sound of explosions.
On one side, the violent Cartel del Sur, on the other, a group called the United Front of Community Police of Guerrero State (FUPCEG), a grassroots citizens militia of 11,700 fighters who patrol 39 municipalities in Guerrero.
The Cartel del Sur’s hold on this region is particularly brutal. Led by Isaac Navarette Celis, the cartel is particularly known for producing and trafficking a potent form of heroin known as China White for which the region’s poppy crop is essential, and for virtually enslaving small towns in this region through extortion and violence.
FUPCEG, headed up by former electrical engineer Salvador Alanis, has taken on the cartel in El Naranjo before.
Last summer the vigilante group, armed with AK-47s, attempted to liberate the small town from the cartel’s grip.
“We fight to free communities that have been isolated by the criminals,” a FUPCEG leader known as “El Burro” told The Daily Beast as they prepared to engage in a gun battle with cartel forces in the town last July. “The people of this town have asked us for help, and so that’s what we’re going to do.”
But the unrest in the region continues, despite FUPCEG’s best efforts.
Last weekend, after a full day of violence, someone decided to call in the cavalry.
A 911 call on Sunday morning reporting the presence of armed civilians in the area prompted a flyover by a Ministry of Public Security helicopter which then called on ground forces, consisting of the National Guard, soldiers and state police to move in. A gun battle ensued, resulting in the deaths of four of the gunmen, presumably cartel members.
Authorities arrested two other men and seized an arsenal of military-grade weapons, ammunition, drugs and explosives. Later another four bodies were found, killed execution-style at least one day prior. It appears an attempt was made to burn them.
On Monday, authorities discovered the bodies of five more men covered in blankets at the bottom of a ravine, as well as hundreds of shell casings and five stolen and two burnt-out vehicles.
This brought the toll to 13 killed in this small town in just two days, while 14 people have been killed by the coronavirus in the entire state since the pandemic began.
López-Gatell announces 'some good news' on Monday.
A resumption of normal life could be possible in almost 1,000 municipalities across the country on May 18 because they have no or very few cases of Covid-19, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said on Monday.
“We have areas of the country that don’t have a significant transmission [of the disease],” López-Gatell said in a video message posted to social media.
“In those municipalities where there are no cases or very few cases,” the government will be able to lift most of the measures in place to limit the spread of Covid-19 before the rest of the country,” he said.
“When? From Monday, May 18. … In almost 1,000 municipalities … we can control the disease, the epidemic of Covid, using others measures that correspond to phase one. This will allow these regions … to recover normality,” López-Gatell said.
The deputy minister announced last week that the government’s social distancing initiative, including the suspension of all nonessential activities, would be extended by an extra month to May 30 but he flagged the possibility of lifting restrictions earlier in parts of the country where there has been little or no transmission of Covid-19.
In Monday’s video, López-Gatell made the surprise assertion that the number of coronavirus cases reported on a daily basis is decreasing and as a result Mexico’s epidemic curve is flattening.
“We have good news, we’re doing well. We are managing to reduce infections, this is what we call flattening the curve. … We have a flatter curve, this means we have fewer cases every day and with this … those people who have a serious disease because of Covid and need hospitalization [will be able to] find a space in the national health system,” he said.
However, López-Gatell acknowledged at both the Health Ministry’s coronavirus press briefing on Monday night and President López Obrador’s regular news conference on Tuesday morning that the rate of Covid-19 infection is in fact accelerating, contradicting his earlier statement.
“Don’t think that we’re already coming out of the epidemic, by no means. We’re not even in the phase of reducing cases,” he said on Monday night.
Acknowledging that Covid-19 is now spreading quickly in the community, López-Gatell declared today that Mexico has now entered phase three of the coronavirus pandemic.
• Covid-19 cases by municipality are provided on this interactive map published by the Mexican Biodiversity Commission. But there are no assurances that the data is complete.
