At the end of 2020, Valladolid was the indigenous municipality in the entire country with the highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19, with 2 thousand 38 accumulated reports, and it was also the only municipality that ended the year with more than 20 active cases since as of December 31st, Valladolid registered 32 confirmed patients in the last 14 days.
Despite efforts to control the pandemic, as not only are urban areas at critical levels of contagion, the virus also reached a large part of rural regions of Mexico.
At the end of last year, 84.6 percent of the indigenous municipalities registered the presence of SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Valladolid is, after Mérida, the municipality with the highest number of deaths, with 86 (as of January 7th).
The municipality that presented the most fatal cases of the disease was Xalapa, Veracruz, where 113 people died from complications from the virus.
Of the 2,465 municipalities in Mexico, the new coronavirus reached 362 of these, which present some degree of extreme poverty. It also reached 949 municipalities with families living in moderate poverty.
Only 159 municipalities across the country have been saved from the virus, most of them are in highly marginalized areas in Oaxaca.
The reason why Covid-19 has not reached these communities is that they have been isolated since before the pandemic.
Most of these contagion-free municipalities are in mountainous areas, with low population density and with limited access to paved roads and other basic services.
In Yucatán, an example of this is Tahdziú, a highly marginalized municipality that was one of the last to report positive cases of Covid-19 and has only had four reports to date.
According to specialists, the complications of Covid-19 in marginalized regions are not limited only to the deficiencies of the public health system or the population’s access to these services, but to the living conditions of the population itself.
Almost all of the indigenous areas have high levels of poverty, educational backwardness, deficiencies in basic household services, and low income. The combination of these factors also intensifies the problem.
