August 14, 2020
Mexico City registered 70 deaths in the last 24 hours
Mexico exceeded half a million people infected by the coronavirus on Thursday, just the day that the Government announced that the country will participate in the production of a vaccine against COVID-19 to be distributed in Latin America in early 2021.
In the last 24 hours, 7,371 new confirmed cases were reported in the territory, bringing the total number of infections to 505,751 , health authorities reported.
The Latin American country also registered 627 deaths related to the new virus , bringing the fatality count to 55,293. This is one of the highest figures in the world, behind only Brazil and the United States, according to a Reuters tally .
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The government declared a quarantine on March 23, although essential economic activities remained open, with no sanctions for non-compliance.
“There is a very limited vision of the true dimension of the epidemic, it is truly difficult to measure the contagion due to the low number of tests” carried out by the country, Malaquías López, epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and former director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico , told AFP. the Secretary of Health.
According to an estimate by the University of Oxford, within a group of 15 Latin American countries, Mexico is the one that performs the fewest tests with 7.96 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Earlier, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that, although the announcement of the new vaccine – agreed between the governments of Argentina and Mexico, with the AstraZeneca laboratory and the Mexican Slim Foundation – represents good news, people must still protect themselves to avoid contagions.
“Unfortunately, we are still going to continue to suffer from the pandemic,” he said. “Of course, it is not the same to take care of ourselves and take care of ourselves without a hope of having a vaccine, now that we have to continue taking care of ourselves and there will be a vaccine later.”
So far, the virus has infected 20.7 million people and claimed the lives of nearly 750,000 worldwide, according to the Reuters count, putting productive activity in check and generating a deep global recession.
“It means tranquility and health, it is really something exceptional that will help us a lot to maintain hope, to end uncertainty, that we already have on the horizon the possibility of a better, healthy life, in what corresponds to this epidemic that has brought so much sadness, so much misfortune in Mexico and in the world ”, indicated the Mexican president when announcing vaccine production in Mexico and Argentina.
The Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard , assured that Mexico was considered for the project to produce the most advanced vaccine that exists, and it will be produced in the country and Argentina.
“It is a vaccine that is in phase 3 and it is estimated that in November the results of phase 3, 1 and 2 will be presented with positive results, in November phase 3 to Cofepris,” reported the Secretary of Foreign Relations.
Once Cofepris authorizes the vaccine, Mexico would be “in a position to start production.
“A laboratory in Argentina, a laboratory in Mexico participate, that is to say, the production chain is Latin American with a technology transfer, it will be produced in Mexico and Argentina. Finishing is done in Mexico and from Mexico it is distributed to Latin America and the Caribbean ”, she highlighted.
Ebrard Casaubón asserted that this agreement would mean having the vaccine six or seven months earlier than expected.
“For those who are seeing us, this may mean that instead of the vaccine arriving or being distributed in Mexico in more than a year, it takes 6-7 months ahead, and that difference is all for the economy, for health, for everything. So, that has been the insistence of President López Obrador for months, that we are on this issue, “said the Secretary of Foreign Relations.
Source: infobae.com
