Mexico’s COVID Disaster
By 
The utter failure at all things that is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really coming to light as true COVID death rates come out of the country.
Mexico’s government acknowledged Saturday that the country’s true death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands above 321,000, almost 60% more than the official test-confirmed number of 201,429.
Mexico does little testing, and because hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without getting a test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review “excess deaths” and review death certificates.
On Saturday, the government quietly published such a report, which found there were 294,287 deaths linked to COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic through Feb. 14. Since Feb. 15 there have been an additional 26,772 test-confirmed deaths.
The higher toll would rival that of Brazil, which currently has the world’s second-highest number of deaths after the United States. But Mexico’s population of 126 million is far smaller than either of those countries.
The new report also confirms just how deadly Mexico’s second wave in January was. As of the end of December, excess death estimates suggested a total of about 220,000 deaths related to COVID-19 in Mexico. That number jumped by around 75,000 in just a month and a half.
Also suggestive were the overall number of “excess deaths” since the pandemic began, around 417,000. Excess deaths are determined by comparing the deaths in a given year to those that would be expected based on data from previous years.
A review of death certificates found about 70.5% of the excess deaths were COVID-19 related, often because it was listed on the certificates as a suspected or contributing cause of death. But some experts say COVID-19 may have contributed to many of the other excess deaths because many people couldn’t get treatment for other diseases because hospitals were overwhelmed.
Wow, AMLO going full Trump and Bolsonaro and denying this is a big deal sure has worked out for the Mexican people! But hey, at least AMLO is laser focused on the biggest issue Mexico has to deal with right now:
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is railing against the production of beer and milk in areas where there isn’t enough water.
López Obrador cancelled plans for a huge brewery on Mexico’s northern border last year, and on Sunday he questioned the whole idea of producing beer for export.
“How can we have beer breweries in the north? How can we produce beer for export? What are we exporting? Water. We don’t have water in the north,” López Obrador said.
Mexico has the largest beer export sector in the world, with about $4.6 billion worth exported annually, largely to the United States.
I certainly grant you that the connection between development and aridity is a real policy problem, but I can also pretty well say that singling out the beer industry is not going to solve anything, not to mention undercutting one of the nation’s leading export sectors.
AMLO man, it’s amazing that he can be this bad. When he was elected and the Latin American right (which is basically ultra-fascist and should never be listened to on anything at all, very much including Venezuela’s disaster) said he would be the next Chavez, I scoffed at that obvious ridiculousness and said that he would be more like Bernie Sanders, a left-populist with deep contempt for both major political parties. But I apologize to Bernie. No one thought AMLO would be this incredibly incompetent and foolish.