MEXICO – Mexico City, the hotbed of the pandemic in the country, reopened its shopping centers with restrictions despite continuing on high alert due to the covid-19 health crisis, which now adds more than 1.9 million cases and more than 168,000 dead.
The mayor of the capital, Claudia Sheinbaum, justified the reopening of shopping centers and department stores to 20% of their capacity because there are “many square meters of distance” between buyers.
Restaurants also extended their opening hours to 9 p.m. on terraces, despite the fact that indoor service is still banned.
“Since they are large surfaces, there is no close contact between customers,” said Sheinbaum, who decreed a maximum stay time of 30 minutes per buyer and a 24-hour schedule from Tuesday to Sunday to facilitate staggered transit.
Several shopping centers in the capital registered lines this Tuesday when they reopened, an unprecedented image after about two months of total closure since their closure on December 19.
“Life goes on and the economy has to go on, it can’t stop,” said María de Lourdes, a retired shopper in a shopping center in the Polanco district, in the center of the capital, in an interview.
At the most critical point of the pandemic, clowns look for the best side of the crisis in the Mexico City subway, a “high contagion zone” in which these artists instruct passengers to use masks and antibacterial gel.
BOOST TO THE ECONOMY
“People need it too. Restaurants, clothes, everything that is the economy. It seems to me very good that this goes back to the way it was before. This is what motivates me: taking care of myself and being able to go out with confidence to the street, “he added, after ensuring that it is important that the health measures imposed are followed.
Those security obligations include weekly covid tests to 20% of the shop assistants, the temperature measurement at the entrance and a registry with QR codes to notify those who were in the establishment of possible infections.
Despite the restrictions, the reopening has caused controversy in a city immersed in great hospital pressure, although for José Luis, a young client, “it had to be opened even before.”
“They were already strangling the merchants. Their oxygen had run out to be able to continue maintaining these very expensive rents (rents),” he said, after revealing his satisfaction at being able to go “have fun for a while” and be able to have products “to try and touch them. “.
José Luis called the reopening “an opportunity to recover the Mexican economy,” which fell 8.3% in 2020, according to preliminary official data.
HOSPITALS FULL
“We reached a point where if the shopping centers were not opened, many sources of work would be lost. All the workers we see here, even the cleaning workers,” he stressed.
The controversial incident occurred at the Magdalena de las Salinas hospital of the Mexican Social Security Institute, in Mexico City. Details in the video.
While the capital’s shopping centers are at a capacity of 20%, hospitals are still at 79% of their occupation, although in recent weeks it has dropped from the 90% registered in mid-January.
Alexis, from the infectology door of Hospital La Raza, where her mother remains in a state of “intermediate severity”, assured that she understood the reactivation of the shopping centers.
“It is a vicious circle. There are really many sick people here, very many. There are many people who are recovering, every day there are people who are healing. But then there are also people who are dying of hunger. It is a vicious circle, or you die Starving or dying of contagion, “he said while waiting, like dozens of people, for the latest information about his mother.
The young man blamed “the consequences” of the pandemic on the fact that Mexican society “is not complying” with the necessary measures and predicted that the end or control of the epidemic will not come “in the short term.”
The latest data from the capital government indicate that Mexico City has exceeded 503,000 positives since the beginning of the epidemic and is close to 31,000 deaths, while maintaining some 23,500 active cases at the moment.
One of those active cases in the city is Jared’s father, admitted for a week in La Raza “with very low oxygenation.”
They ask the authorities to allow them to open their businesses for longer.
“After December they began to get sick. We had not had any sick in the family and after December (the infections) of my acquaintances and my family in particular rose,” Jared explained, summarizing in one sentence the outbreak at the end of the year that devastated all of Mexico and in particular the capital.
According to health authorities, the epidemiological curve is going down again, despite which “it is not prudent” to reopen, according to Jared.
“From the beginning there was a bad handling of all this. Suddenly they opened, suddenly they closed. Right now they open again, but it is just at the moment in which there are more cases. I think there has been a bad handling,” he concluded.
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