Phase three of the coronavirus pandemic in Mexico began on April 21, and with it a series of challenges; how to avoid saturating hospitals and intensive care units, decrease the number of deaths, and strengthen containment and mitigation measures in the population.
Regarding this stage, Héctor Pérez Gómez, member of the Situation Room of the University of Guadalajara (UdeG), explained that the duration of the stage is estimated to be six weeks and it is expected that the critical part of the epidemic may be located between May 5 and 15.
Pérez Gómez highlighted the importance of a greater number of laboratory tests being carried out at the national level, as is already the case in Jalisco, in order to promptly isolate carriers as a mitigation measure.
In the last two months, Mexico has only test 51,000 people for COVID-19 out of the nationwide population over 130 million people.
The specialist recognized that during this phase, confirmed cases can be doubled every four or five days and commented that this stage is defined by the World Health Organization as the stage where cases number in the thousands and are community cases, in which it is not possible to clearly identify where the contagion was caused.
He emphasized that a key point to avoid the death of COVID- 19 carriers will be “to promptly detect cases that are going to have serious behavior, to act quickly on patients in order to avoid evolutions to the critical phases of the disease”.
Finally, he commented that a future challenge will be to obtain drugs and protocols that are endorsed to combat COVID -19, because “then it happens that these drugs take a long time to be available worldwide, because they are delayed in their authorization by regulatory agencies and lagging behind in large-scale production and distribution, and there also needs to be no pharmaceutical speculation.”
Source: PVDN