Mexico has entered the sixth wave of covid after six weeks of surging cases. This was confirmed by the undersecretary of health, Hugo López-Gatell, at the president’s conference this Tuesday at the National Palace. An average of 1,818 infections and one death per day were recorded last week. “The mortality is frankly low, fortunately this is the result of the extensive vaccination that has been carried out throughout the territory,” the official highlighted. Nor has hospital occupancy increased, continuing at 4% for general purpose beds and 2% for ventilator beds. “There is likely to be an increase, but fortunately there is an important separation between infections and the probability of having a serious disease,” López Gatell underlined. This new wave of coronavirus has coincided with the return of influenza, the other respiratory virus that has been overshadowed by covid-19 since 2020.
There is a culprit for the return of covid-19 infections, according to López-Gatell: winter. “Respiratory infections caused by viruses they have a higher transmission capacity during the cold season because the droplets of respiratory fluid, the secretions, last longer in the air and this makes them more suitable for spreading from one person to another, also because we tend to aggregate in closed spaces and because the efficiency of the immune system at a of the respiratory system is reduced less efficient,” explained the official, who tried to minimize the current impact of this sixth wave.
From 6 November to today in Mexico the number of cases per day has increased from 683 to almost 2,000, i.e. infections have tripled in just a month and a half. “It is a slow increase from the speed of the fourth or fifth wave,” the undersecretary said. At the peak of cases, which occurred in early 2022 with the onslaught of omicron, the number rose to 60,000 infections per day.
This rebound led states like Nuevo León re-order the mandatory use of masks in enclosed spaces. López-Gatell also acknowledged that the mask is useful in these cases: “There is no need to argue, the mask is useful for closed public spaces, such as public transport”. However, he recalled that “the most plausible forecast in the global scientific community is that covid-19 gradually enters the season in a seasonal phase, stops having these waves in spring and summer, and start synchronizing with the rest of the 360+ respiratory viruses”.
The states that currently concentrate the largest number of cases are Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Nuevo León, Guanajuato and Jalisco. Depending on the population, Quintana Roo is the place with the highest incidence and has up to 70 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 10 cases per 100,000 inhabitants recorded by Nuevo León.
Another of those viruses is the flu, a respiratory disease that seemed forgotten for the past three years as covid-19 infections flooded everything. There has been a vaccine in Mexico for years, but in an opinion much criticized today, López-Gatell said it is only for people over the age of 60, children under five, pregnant women or people with comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, immunosuppression, or cardiovascular disease Chronicles.
“Healthy young people go to vaccination posts and this takes away the opportunity for people who really benefit from the vaccine [de la influenza]”, he insisted, “there is no need for young people to get vaccinated: because the vaccine does not protect against contagion but rather against the risk of complications and death, and this risk is considerably greater at the extremes of age”. The official has already generated a lot of controversy when he spent months denying that children should be vaccinated against covid-19, while in other countries they were included in vaccination plans. Eventually, and when other age groups were covered, the government relented.
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