Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day since coronavirus
Speaker 1: was declared a global pandemic. Our main story in Mexico.
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen is raging out of control, but the country's
Speaker 1: health system has been failing its citizens for decades. Today
Speaker 1: a dispatch from the country's capital where patients fear the
Speaker 1: hospital almost as much as the disease. But first, here's
Speaker 1: what happened today. Treasury Secretary Stephen Nuchin rejected the idea
Speaker 1: of rolling back the reopening of the economy even if
Speaker 1: there is another surge in coronavirus cases. His remarks came
Speaker 1: in an interview today with CNBC. We can't shut down
Speaker 1: the economy again. I think we've learned that if you
Speaker 1: shut down the economy, you're going to create more damage,
Speaker 1: and not just economic damage. But there are there are
Speaker 1: other areas, and we've talked about this of medical problems
Speaker 1: and everything else that get put on hold. Minuction said
Speaker 1: we could avoid another shutdown because COVID nineteen testing and
Speaker 1: contact tracing are improving. He also said officials understand more
Speaker 1: about how to contain outbreaks, but contact tracing efforts aren't
Speaker 1: turning out to be a perfect solution, even in countries
Speaker 1: that are investing in them. In the first week of
Speaker 1: contact tracing in England, tracers didn't get in touch with
Speaker 1: the third of new cases referred to them. The country's
Speaker 1: Department of Health and Social Care said in a statement
Speaker 1: that the teams identified nearly thirty two thousand contacts in
Speaker 1: the first week. Around twenty seven thousand were advised to
Speaker 1: self isolate. Finally, Moderna's vaccine trial is moving fast. The
Speaker 1: company said it had selected a dose for a final
Speaker 1: stage clinical trial of its coronavirus vaccine that should begin
Speaker 1: in July. The final study, which will include thirty thousand people,
Speaker 1: will be conducted in collaboration with a National Institute of
Speaker 1: Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US. It's primary goal
Speaker 1: will be to show that the vaccine prevents people from
Speaker 1: developing symptoms of COVID nineteen and now our main story.
Speaker 1: The coronavirus is hitting Latin America in ways unseen in
Speaker 1: the developed world. One place that's seen a devastating surgeon
Speaker 1: cases is Mexico. But what makes Mexico's outbreak worse is
Speaker 1: that it's savaging a health care system that was already inadequate.
Speaker 1: Doctors and nurses in Mexico say they lacked the most
Speaker 1: basic of protective gear like masks and gloves. Hospitals are
Speaker 1: at capacity. In Mexico City, more than twenty thousand doctors, nurses,
Speaker 1: and hospital staff have caught the virus. It's another grim
Speaker 1: reminder that the illness is spiraling out of control. I
Speaker 1: spoke with Naha Katan, a Bloomberg reporter in Mexico City
Speaker 1: who has watched the crisis unfold. She talked about what
Speaker 1: happens when a crisis hits a system that was unprepared
Speaker 1: and underfunded in the best of times. What is the
Speaker 1: situation in Mexico right now with COVID nineteen. So as
Speaker 1: of last week, we saw a lot of record new cases,
Speaker 1: new new death toll records, including deaths rising above one
Speaker 1: thousand in one day. The government says it didn't all
Speaker 1: happen in one day, and that there's a lag, but
Speaker 1: the fact is that the cases were coming in, you know,
Speaker 1: at a at a faster pace, and the government itself
Speaker 1: said we're now at at this peak, you know, pandemic.
Speaker 1: We're at this crisis time and at the same time,
Speaker 1: hospital specifically in Mexico City. We're at capacity. So I
Speaker 1: think a big question is if we haven't seen that
Speaker 1: full wave actually come in and be hospitalized yet, because
Speaker 1: we just saw the initial numbers and we don't know
Speaker 1: where they are on the timeline. What do you do
Speaker 1: when you have instead of eighty percent capacity? What happens
Speaker 1: if that capacity goes up and we lose space in
Speaker 1: the hospital system. And that kind of brings me to
Speaker 1: the Mexico City public hospital system. They've they've been they've
Speaker 1: been so bad for so long that even compared to
Speaker 1: Latin America, Mexico has one of the worst public health
Speaker 1: care systems. It spends the least on health as a
Speaker 1: percentage of GDP than every other Latin American country except
Speaker 1: for Peru and Venezuela. That was data I found from
Speaker 1: the World Bank. And we don't even know when this
Speaker 1: is over, and we're already at capacity in Mexico City,
Speaker 1: So there's just a lot of red flags going up here.
Speaker 1: Has there been any attempt physically with regard to hospitals
Speaker 1: and this capacity issue. Has there been any any discussion,
Speaker 1: any proposal little to try and address some of these
Speaker 1: very significant capacity concerns within the hospitals, Oh absolutely, I
Speaker 1: mean the government has has built hospitals. Well, there's one
Speaker 1: in Mexico City that is kind of a makeshift, you know,
Speaker 1: health facility that that was built very quickly. Mexico has
Speaker 1: highed thousands of healthcare workers according to official numbers, and
Speaker 1: they've made a huge push from the US to China
Speaker 1: to get ventilators brought here as quickly as possible, because
Speaker 1: we only had about five thousand in the whole country.
Speaker 1: I know there's a push being made to improve the situation.
Speaker 1: It's just a question of whether it's too little, too late,
Speaker 1: of whether the cases will overwhelm this attempt to to
Speaker 1: improve things. And the one sign we have is just
Speaker 1: that Mexico's healthcare workers infected by COVID did double in
Speaker 1: two weeks from you know, eleven thousands to twenty to
Speaker 1: a little over twenty thou and deaths have reached close
Speaker 1: to what we've seen in the US, which is where
Speaker 1: there have been many, many more cases than in Mexico.
Speaker 1: So that doesn't bode well for you know, Mexico's attempts
Speaker 1: to really to really overhaul the system as quickly as
Speaker 1: it's trying to do. I mean, I think the attempts
Speaker 1: are are good and an important, but it's not clear
Speaker 1: how much they can do in such a short time.
Speaker 1: What's the status of Mexico in terms of social distancing
Speaker 1: policies or lockdown enforcement. I mean officially, Mexico started reopening
Speaker 1: actually mid May in certain parts of the country. At
Speaker 1: the start of June, it's reopening further. Basically, they're they're
Speaker 1: making sectors like the automobile sector and construction considered essential activity,
Speaker 1: so people who work in those sectors can leave their
Speaker 1: homes and go to their places of work if the
Speaker 1: companies have the security protocol set up. And what we've
Speaker 1: seen since then is that there has been a spike
Speaker 1: across Mexico in activity, even though unlike other countries, this
Speaker 1: beginning of a reopening is happening before Mexico actually reaches
Speaker 1: its peak. Uh. And that's caused a lot of questions
Speaker 1: among um some health experts in the fields. Mexico City
Speaker 1: was at the heart of the H one and one
Speaker 1: outbreak UM several years ago, and I'm just wondering has
Speaker 1: that informed Mexico's response to COVID nineteen at all. It has,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're using this Sentinnel model, which is
Speaker 1: a way of projecting how many cases there really are
Speaker 1: without doing testing among the entire population. So there's limited
Speaker 1: testing and the government is saying, you know, this is
Speaker 1: what worked for us in the past, but again critics say,
Speaker 1: we need to test much more broadly. We don't really
Speaker 1: know what's happening. You know. There are the news reports
Speaker 1: and others coming out with figures death tolls that might
Speaker 1: might be much higher and cases that are that are
Speaker 1: definitely higher. It's actually raised a lot of questions about
Speaker 1: the data in Mexico. In general, Mexico is looking pretty grim,
Speaker 1: but the entire Latin American region is now considered the epicenter.
Speaker 1: The World Health Organization last week said that Brazil, Mexico
Speaker 1: and other countries here account for more than one million cases.
Speaker 1: They don't really see a peak, no stabilization really coming
Speaker 1: at this point, you know. And that's happening at the
Speaker 1: same time as a lot of statements out of the
Speaker 1: government suggests that things are much better. So you kind
Speaker 1: of get, on one hand information from the government that
Speaker 1: makes it that makes you think that maybe things are
Speaker 1: finally coming under control, maybe even as soon as as
Speaker 1: early as this week, but there's so much data from
Speaker 1: weeks past, and so much so many kind of record
Speaker 1: breaking death tolls, daily death tolls that have happened recently,
Speaker 1: that it's just not clear where Mexico is on the
Speaker 1: you know, in the pandemic curve. And like other countries
Speaker 1: in the region in Latin America, Mexico faces poor health
Speaker 1: care systems and very few social safety nets because well,
Speaker 1: Mexico was slow to lockdown. They waited until the end
Speaker 1: of March, and the enforcement has been pretty lax in
Speaker 1: the lockdown because companies are just strongly urged to close
Speaker 1: that there's no there's a force shutdown, which is what
Speaker 1: the president has said. He's he's persuading companies, he's not
Speaker 1: forcing them to shut and people are returning to the streets.
Speaker 1: They have no money to eat, and there is very
Speaker 1: little money being spent on the economic recovery. The government
Speaker 1: has said it doesn't want to go further into debt,
Speaker 1: so it's not really doling out the kind of unemployment
Speaker 1: insurance or um you know, aid packages to the poor
Speaker 1: that you might be seeing another in other countries. And
Speaker 1: and this does raise a good question that I think
Speaker 1: you've been touching on but maybe if we could maybe
Speaker 1: unpack even more. You know, obviously there's been extreme economic
Speaker 1: fallout from COVID nineteen globally, but with specific reference to Mexico,
Speaker 1: what has been the economic fallout from COVID nineteen. The
Speaker 1: official jobs lost something around five is just kind of
Speaker 1: a sliver of of what's really happening because there's whole
Speaker 1: informal sector and very complex ways of measuring unemployment here.
Speaker 1: But there was one study also from a public agency
Speaker 1: about twelve million people either losing their jobs or not
Speaker 1: working because they're on furlough or just not working at
Speaker 1: that moment as of April. And that's that's a very
Speaker 1: big number. And one of the deputy governors of the
Speaker 1: Central Bank wrote along article where he argues that Mexico's
Speaker 1: labor crisis is far worse than the labor crisis in
Speaker 1: the US. Some people within the president's own party saying
Speaker 1: we need to go into further debt so that we
Speaker 1: can pay for the recovery and help the poor. And
Speaker 1: again that's not something that's that's shifting very very extensively,
Speaker 1: that the government is sticking to its message that it
Speaker 1: will do things through austerity. Through budget cuts and not
Speaker 1: through overspending and you know, bailouts to companies for example.
Speaker 1: Has there been any broader requests or asks of the
Speaker 1: government in terms of what steps they need to be
Speaker 1: taking in terms of maybe flattening that curve. The one
Speaker 1: constant is testing, testing, testing. There needs to be more testing.
Speaker 1: That's the suggestion coming from all sides. And it's it's
Speaker 1: the one area where Mexico is not it's not really boosting,
Speaker 1: it's testing numbers. That was Nahakatan and that's our show today.
Speaker 1: You can find naha story on the situation in Mexico
Speaker 1: City and how it has affected her own family on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com. And for coverage of the outbreak from
Speaker 1: one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com slash Corona of Virus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: produced by Topher foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and me
Speaker 1: Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Naha Katan.
Speaker 1: Original music by Leo Citrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi
Speaker 1: and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.