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Mexico is in the top 3 of the countries of the American continent that perform the least COVID-19 tests on its inhabitants

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  • Mexico is in the top 3 of the countries of the American continent that perform the least COVID-19 tests on its inhabitants

    Source: https://www.infobae.com/america/mexi...us-habitantes/

    Mexico is in the top 3 of the countries of the American continent that perform the least COVID-19 tests on its inhabitants The statistical site Worldometer registers that for every million people living in Mexican territory, only 37,612 are tested
    By Alicia Mireles
    February 7, 2021

    Mexico is among the three countries in the American continent with the least number of COVID-19 tests performed, with 37,612 tests per million inhabitants. This is recorded by the real-time statistics site Woldometer.

    Only Haiti (population of 11,485,972 people), with 4,295 tests per million inhabitants, and Nicaragua (population of 6,671,875) with no reported figures surpassed it in this matter. Since the pandemic began, the first reported a cumulative 6,299 positive cases for the virus and 170 deaths. While in the second the total number of infections is 11,806 and 256 deaths from this disease.

    But the case of Mexico differs greatly from that figure. It is a country of 129,746,745 million people. It also records a total accumulated cases of 1,926,080 and 165,786 deaths.

    So, given the almost two million positive cases reported in official figures, since the first case of COVID-19 was registered in the Aztec country, taking into account that they only test 3.76% of its inhabitants, it reinforces one of the biggest fears in the context of the pandemic: there would be many more cases of the (already) alarming number of infections reported.

    The main health organizations worldwide have already emphasized their alert for this issue. The World Health Organization recently warned that in Mexico "the rate of positives is very high and if more tests were done it would probably be higher."

    While, just last week, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned that in Mexico cases and deaths from the virus continue to increase, especially in states that attracted significant tourism during the Christmas season, such as Guerrero, Quintana Roo, Nayarit and Baja California del Sur.

    In the same way, several specialists have already warned, on different occasions, that all these statistics only reveal "the failure of the strategy" undertaken by the federal government - headed by the Undersecretary of Health, Hugo L?pez-Gatell -, the same as since March 2020 (when the health crisis began in Mexico) has rejected prioritizing mass testing of the virus, and instead has opted to mitigate cases, rather than contain them.

    For example, the internist at the ABC hospital, Dr. Francisco Moreno, who said through his Twitter account: “Mexico is the 156th country in tests per million inhabitants for the detection of # COVID19 cases. Only Haiti on the American continent has conducted fewer tests than we have. What does it take to change a failed strategy ”.

    Another scientific voice on the epidemic in Mexico, who has spoken in the same sense, is Dr. Laurie Ann Xim?nez-Fyvie, Doctor of Medical Sciences from Harvard University. In an interview for Infobae Mexico, the expert pointed out that it is still vitally important to locate as many infections as possible to be able to contain them and cut the transmission chains, in order to avoid the accelerated spread of the virus that the country is experiencing.

    For this, the author of Un irreparable damage - a text on the handling of the pandemic by the Mexican government - insisted that it is necessary to test as many inhabitants as possible in order to also locate asymptomatic cases, taking into account that 70% of cases are asymptomatic, according to the National Institute of Public Health reported in December.

    The doctor explained in the dialogue with this medium that one of the “very serious errors is having always biased the taking of samples from the symptomatic population. It has us flying blind because we do not really know the extent of the spread of infections in the community (...) it is very difficult to make estimates of how many people are actually infected ”.

    And the most serious thing, the academic pointed out, is that the situation can still get much worse, with the appearance - which is already happening - of new variants of COVID-19 that make it more contagious, "the second chapter of the pandemic will to write those variants of the virus ".

    "It is necessary to expand the capacity of diagnostic tests and implement a contact tracing strategy", that is, from a positive to be able to locate asymptomatic cases to cut the chains of contagion. Now it is more complicated - there are already hundreds of thousands of cases and the viral load is much higher than at the beginning - but "it is what should be done", insisted the head of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory of the Faculty of Dentistry of the UNAM.

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