Mexico City and COVID-19 in late December

It’s been a while since I’ve shared an update about COVID-19 in Mexico, partly because things have been pretty stable.

In our area, we have remained at the orange alert since the summer – that is, one away from red, the highest level.

Well, as of today, we are once again at level red in Mexico City.

Here is a chart showing positive cases per day. The chart doesn’t mean a lot, in some ways, except that public perception is of course affected by the public information.

A note on what you’re seeing. This represents new positive tests (a 7 day average). As we know by now, there are a lot of cases that go untested (and testing remains low in Mexico), and a lot of false positives. But generally, rates have been remarkably stable since things started opening up again mid-summer. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you’d think that opening up decreased cases.

There’s one quick jump in October, and one quick jump in November. Those are actually because of a single day (two single days) of extremely high numbers. I’m not sure why that would be. And actually, I see the same spikes in several countries – does anyone know what that’s from? Changes in policy? Testing methods? (Oddly, I see it being blamed on different things in each country, which makes no sense…) You can actually see a little spike in Canada at the same time in October, if you look at the chart below.

But without those two days, the line would remain fairly stable from July until now, with a slight increase over the last month. Testing has also increased, so that could be a part of the reason.

Now, this chart represents deaths attributed to COVID-19.

This time we have Mexico on the top and Canada on the bottom. Once again, there are a couple of days – one in particular – that were extremely high. Other than that, numbers were stable and dropping over the summer, and rising steadily in October, and then levelling off over the past month.

As with many different coronaviruses, perhaps there is a climate issue here. Which would mean we would expect to see numbers rise in Mexico through February, and then begin to drop again.

At the moment, there is lots of room in the “COVID-19” hospitals in our area. The problem seems to be that health workers are being given much more to do, and hospitals are not taking other patients, or else patients are not going to get the treatment they need due to the fear of COVID-19. From several sources I’m hearing that very serious treatment is becoming much harder to get, which means we may see an increase in deaths from several causes.

Another issue now is that many families who are trying to pay for treatments, or pay for food, are suddenly finding themselves without work right before Christmas. As the cold weather comes and clothing and heating expenses increase in our area, there will be less money to pay for it because of the closures. Another concern is that alcohol purchases are high at this time of year, and more people are stuck at home, leading to a serious increase in abuse.

Several of us from the church met for prayer last night. For the time being, we will return to our interactive online services, starting tomorrow. But we are working on some plans to improve our connection with one another, especially in the new year.

Right now the level red is supposed to continue until the 10th of January. But if cases rise during the time of cold weather (and of course cold weather sickness apart from COVID-19 does generally increase in the colder weather in Mexico City), the lockdown will likely be extended.

So do pray with us as we make ministry plans for the new year. It will look a lot different from last year, but we are also coming into it knowing a lot more than we did last year.