Name: Mexico's COVID Cases and Deaths are Underreported—Why?
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Discover why coronavirus cases and deaths have been underreported in Mexico—and how it's not the only country with this problem.

Learn more about the COVID pandemic in Mexico.

Discover why coronavirus cases and deaths have been underreported in Mexico—and how it's not the only country with this problem.

Mexico's COVID Cases and Deaths are Underreported—Why?

Learn more about the COVID pandemic in Mexico.

Body & Brain

Mexico's COVID Cases and Deaths are Underreported—Why?Published: April 16, 2021Arlo Perez: This is my mom. What are we making?Arlo's mom: My first banana make, bread—Perez: The morning after we shot this, she got diagnosed with COVID. Loved ones getting diagnosed with COVID is a reality that has been all too common, but foolishly, it's a reality that I thought I could avoid. It didn't work out. Let me explain.I live in Boston, located in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which has a population of roughly 800,000 people. Meanwhile, my parents live a couple of hundred miles west of Mexico City in Uruapan, Michoacán. That region has nearly 700,000 people. By last fall, Suffolk County was reporting tens of thousands of cases from COVID-19.But in the same timeframe, reported cases in the Uruapan region were only a small fraction of that. Simple math, right? Leave Boston, fly to Mexico with the parents, avoid the pandemic. So that's what I did. But within days, my parents' friend was diagnosed positive, and then it was my uncle, and then my old neighbor, and not even a week from when I arrive, my middle school teacher passed away from COVID.By the time my mom was diagnosed, I had started to suspect that the official numbers were not telling the full story.Mercedes Salinas Esparza: A patient arrives to this area, which is a mobile unit provided by the state. For two weeks where the number of people coming has dropped.It is worrisome how calm it is.Fernando Carlos Camargo Ponce de León: People are afraid to come to our institutions because they believe we will give them COVID. So they stay home.Perez: It's not just this region. All over Mexico, people are avoiding hospitals, and that has a major impact on the healthcare professional's ability to test for the virus.Esparza: Patients with grave symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, do not come in. I don't know if a patient needs a test unless they come in.Sinhue Díaz Acevedo: People have stopped showing up for COVID tests. People have stopped coming. Thereby the number of positive cases has also gone down. But that does not mean that we don't have positive cases in the area.Camargo Ponce de León: The risk is they stay home, die there, and we do not know if they had COVID, or did not have COVID.Perez: One survey in Mexico found that nearly a quarter of the people who said they knew someone who died from COVID reported that those people died in their own homes.Camargo Ponce de León: The problem is those cases aren’t recorded at a national level.Perez: Mexico isn't the only place where this is happening.Reporter: A local organization called Doctors Alliance accuses the government of trying to cover up the coronavirus outbreak here.Perez: Other countries have also been accused of under-reporting COVID cases. Now experts think that part of the issue with the data in Mexico could be because people are getting private tests that don't get tallied in the national numbers. But this only tells part of the story.Esparza: People seem to be afraid of letting other people know they have COVID.Carlos García Mora: People will discriminate against them, the community will isolate them, Because, logically, people will be afraidPerez: Many media outlets in Mexico report discrimination against people who test positive for the virus and the doctors and nurses who treat the infected. The fear is that this is one of the main factors discouraging people who actually have the virus from going and getting tested.And what is worse, even when someone ultimately dies from COVID, the family may be incentivized to hide it.José Rubén Maldonado: In one of these crypts...over here, here it is, exactly! This was the first body that was interred here.Perez: This is Ruben Maldonado. He runs a private cemetery in Uruapan. In the first six months of the pandemic, he saw a 12% increase in deaths.Maldonado: That has forced us to speed up the construction of more crypts.Perez: Ruben also believes that families are keeping the true cause of their diseased relatives' deaths a secret.Maldonado: There have been many times when we are receiving a body and the relatives themselves don't want to get close to it.They write “respiratory insufficiency” as the cause of death. All the symptoms of their relatives are from COVID. They most definitely died of COVID.Camargo Ponce de León: They are writing in another sickness, like a heart attack, like a cerebral embolism. People have even asked us not to put COVID on the death certificate. Why?Maldonado: Why? Because they were all cremated. The bodies that die of COVID cannot be buried, they must be cremated.Perez: This presents a challenge for Mexico, a country that is primarily Catholic, since cremation is not traditionally viewed as a proper way of putting their dead to rest.Camargo Ponce de León: Here, religion plays a big role. There are still people who, especially in small towns, do not want or accept cremation.Mora: Imagine that your father, your mother, your brother dies and you cannot give them the funeral that is due. And you can't even be there at their deathbed to accompany them in their final minutes. And then you have to cremate the corpse.Camargo Ponce de León: That is why people don’t want to come to the hospitals anymore. That is why they stay home. Because they do not want to hear “they died of COVID”Perez: This lack of data has an effect beyond statistics. Mexico's using a traffic light system to determine restrictions and policies with colors representing the severity of the pandemic. The problem is that these colors are determined by the rate of people who get diagnosed or treated in the hospital. If people aren't going to the hospital, those cases aren't recorded and restrictions in policies in some areas end up being way looser than they should be.After this, I had to go back to Boston. The Mexican government has been unresponsive to requests for updates on whether COVID-19 is still being under-reported. But as of February 2021, the difference in reported cases between Boston and Uruapan was still staggering with Suffolk County reporting that 18% of their population has had COVID while the Uruapan region reports less than 1%.Fortunately today, vaccines have become a cause for cautious global optimism. Mexico, like the rest of the world, seems to be on the path towards vaccinating large portions of the population and potentially moving beyond the pandemic. But the long-term result of all the stigma around COVID might end up being that we never really know what the true impact of COVID really was.Fortunately for my family, my mom recovered quickly. But this isn't the case for everyone, especially those who have felt the need to hide their suffering.

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Mexico's COVID Cases and Deaths are Underreported—Why?

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