Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced Monday that he has been infected with SARS-CoV-2 – for the second time – and that he has mild COVID-19 symptoms.
“I was infected (…) and although the symptoms are mild, I will be isolated, I will not work in the office and I will only communicate digitally,” the head of state said via Twitter.
The 68-year-old president, who rarely wears a mask, had a hoarse voice on Monday during his daily press conference, explaining that he decided to get tested for the new coronavirus, even though he thought he had the flu.
Mr. Lopez Obrador was first infected in January 2021; he had mild symptoms of the disease even then. He received the AstraZeneca vaccine last year and a booster dose on January 7th.
In Mexico, a country of some 129 million people, the deaths from COVID-19 broke the 300,000 barrier on Friday from the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic. It is the country with the fifth heaviest pandemic death toll in the world, after the United States, Brazil, India and Russia. On Saturday, a record thirty thousand more cases were announced. The Omicron variant, first identified in the country on December 3rd, is rapidly becoming dominant.
The Mexican government acknowledges the pandemic resurgence, but refuses to take action that would hurt economic activity, as hospital admissions and deaths remain at manageable levels, as it sees it.
In the past 24 hours, 78 patients died due to complications of COVID-19 and 11,052 cases of SARS-CoV-2 were confirmed, with the death toll reaching 300,412 deaths out of a total of 4,136,440 infections. However, experts have pointed out and officials of the Ministry of Health have acknowledged that the official figures are very underestimated in relation to reality.
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