Lance Armstrong likely to be removed from New York City, Boston marathon results, too

(Michael Paulsen / AP) Lance Armstrong’s name is likely to be expunged from the results of the New York City and Boston marathons, in addition to the Tour de France. Officials from both NYC and Boston races said they expect to follow decisions by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the International Cycling Union to ban Amstrong from competition and strip him of his seven Tour de France titles. However, both marathons are likely to wait until any appeals have taken place. Armstrong had been banned in late summer from running in the Chicago Marathon as well as the NYC race; those and the Boston race are governed by USA Track and Field rules. “I anticipate the results will come out of our archives,” Mary Wittenberg, president and chief executive officer of the New York Road Runners (sponsor of the NYC Marathon), told Bloomberg Businessweek. “Lance doesn’t have a place in running because we will stick to the rules and support USADA.” Boston Marathon officials also are waiting for any appeals to be exhausted before removing Armstrong’s name from its 2008 race finishers. “[T]here have been a great many developments on the matter of Mr. Armstrong over a rapid period of time. Perhaps there will be appeals,” Tom Grilk, executive dircector of the Boston Athletic Association, said in a statement to Runner’s World Newswire. “We have no way of knowing that. We will make every effort to be as thoughtful in our approach as the various governing bodies have been in theirs, and we will comply with the rules. Right now, it appears that the application of those rules will require expungement.” Armstrong, who no longer describes himself as a “seven-time Tour de France winner” on his Twitter bio, competes in triathlons. The Half Full and SuperFrog triathlons have recently chosen to have Armstrong participate, passing up sanctioning by USA Triathlon. Armstrong has denied doping, but gave up his fight against allegations in August. Follow us: More Armstrong changes his Twitter bio ICU bans Armstrong, strips him of Tour titles Armstrong’s participation trumps being officially sanctioned Armstrong in the SuperFrog Armstrong says he will fight no longer Armstrong “deserves to be forgotten” Nike, other sponsors drop Armstrong What’s next for Livestrong? Photos: Gallery of Armstrong’s career

(Michael Paulsen / AP) Lance Armstrong’s name is likely to be expunged from the results of the New York City and Boston marathons, in addition to the Tour de France. Armstrong has denied doping, but gave up his fight against allegations in August. Follow us: More Armstrong changes his Twitter bio ICU bans Armstrong, strips him of Tour titles Armstrong’s participation trumps being officially sanctioned Armstrong in the SuperFrog Armstrong says he will fight no longer Armstrong “deserves to be forgotten” Nike, other sponsors drop Armstrong What’s next for Livestrong?


I'm looking for information about the prevalence of marathon runners who cheat.

A 61-year old runner was discovered to have cheated in the Marine Corps Marathon. I am looking for information about other cases of cheating in marathon races.  Documents with information describing methods of determining cheating has occurred, reactions of accused cheaters and any consequences they received are all relevant. Information about individual cheaters discovered and the possible prevalence of marathon cheating also is of interest. To be relevant, the document must describe a marathon in the USA.

Find articles related to this question on marathon cheating cases.

70-year-old marathon runner accused of cheating found dead in Los Angeles River

Frank Meza, the 70-year-old marathon runner whose record time in the Los Angeles Marathon recently was disqualified because of suspicions that he cheated, was found dead Thursday morning in the Los Angeles River, the Los Angeles County Coroner confirmed to The Washington Post on Friday.
Although Meza’s body was found lying in shallow water northeast of downtown Los Angeles in the Cypress Park area, LAPD officials do not suspect that he drowned, ABC 13 reported. The exact cause of death has not been determined, and an autopsy will be performed.
“Running was very important to my husband. He had been running marathons for the last 30 or 40 years. He was very fast, quite fast, and now unfortunately he won’t run marathons any more,” Meza’s wife, Tina, told the Daily Beast, adding that her husband told her he was going out for a run Thursday morning and never returned. Rescue workers found his body in the river below Figueroa Street around 10 a.m. and pronounced him dead at the scene.
In March, Meza finished the Los Angeles Marathon in 2 hours 53 minutes 10 seconds, unofficially the fastest-ever time for a man his age. The record pace almost immediately aroused suspicion in the distance-running community, especially because Meza had twice been disqualified and eventually banned from a marathon in Sacramento, and an running journalist named Derek Murphy published a story in May that provided photographic evidence that claimed Meza had cut the course.
Meza denied cheating, saying he merely left the course to use the restroom and immediately returned. But on Monday, the Los Angeles Marathon’s organizer announced that it had disqualified Meza based on video evidence and an eyewitness account that he had left the course and then reentered it in a different location. The organizer also found that he had posted a midrace five-kilometer split time that would have set the world record at that distance for the 70-to-74 age group, “an impossible feat during a marathon.”
The marathon did say that Meza would be allowed to participate in the 2020 race if he allowed an observer to track his path.
“That’s my only silver lining,” he said.
Meza, a lifelong runner and retired physician who had worked to provide health care to low-income Southern California residents, didn’t start running marathons until later in life. He began to attract attention when his marathon times went from about 3½ hours or longer to less than three hours, setting personal bests with times of 2:53:33 at the 2014 California International Marathon in Sacramento and then a 2:52:47 at the 2015 Los Angeles Marathon a few months later. But the marathon in Sacramento questioned the irregular splits he posted in 2014 and 2016, eventually disqualifying him from both and banning him from the race. His time in the 2015 Los Angeles Marathon also was scrutinized, but race organizers said they did not have enough evidence to disqualify him.
Murphy also accused Meza of cheating at a February marathon in Arizona, when he again set an age-group record with a time of 2:53:54. Murphy claims photo evidence proves that Meza’s split times were significantly slower than his overall time and that he did not appear when he should have on an official race video camera set up at the 22-mile mark, alleging that Meza skipped that portion of the course. On Thursday, Murphy published a photo that he claims shows Meza riding a bicycle during the 2014 San Francisco Marathon, another race in which Meza set age-group records.
Meza’s wife told the Daily Beast that the reports were “manufactured lies.”
“We don’t understand why he was attacked,” she added. “He was just a soft-spoken, nice person. It hurt him deeply. I still don’t understand it.”


Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon winner who wasn’t, dies at 66

The first woman to cross the finish line of the 1980 Boston Marathon seemed to have run 800 meters, not 26.2 miles. Scarcely out of breath, hair still in place, she had finished her first marathon in New York months earlier in just under three hours, then set a course record in Boston with a stunning time of 2 hours 31 minutes 56 seconds, the third fastest in women’s history.
But competitors said they never saw Rosie Ruiz and her bright yellow shirt fly down the course. On video tapes of the marathon, the 26-year-old Cuban American was nowhere to be found. No one had jotted down her number, W50, at checkpoints during the event.
Four days after the race, officials in New York concluded that she had skipped much of that city’s marathon, apparently taking a 16-mile subway ride to the finish after turning an ankle. And in what is sometimes described as one of the worst moments in marathon history, Ms. Ruiz was soon stripped of her Boston Marathon title as well, as race officials determined she had jumped in with roughly half a mile to go, cheating Canadian runner Jacqueline Gareau at the finish line.
Ms. Ruiz, who later went by Rosie M. Vivas, was 66 when she died July 8, according to an obituary her family placed with a funeral home in West Palm Beach, Fla. The obituary said she had been diagnosed with cancer more than 10 years ago but did not specify where she died.
In rare interviews after the Boston race, Ms. Ruiz always insisted that she had completed the marathon. As she saw it, her boyish short hair had led the crowd to mistake her for a men’s runner; officials were embarrassed that she, an amateur, had defeated the professionals; and her victory marked a “triumph” for women’s sports.
“I do not believe that there is enough coverage for women in any of the races,” Ms. Ruiz said in a tearful news conference days after the marathon. “I believe that maybe after this, whether you prove me guilty or not — which I am not — there will be more coverage of women crossing the finish line during 26 miles.”
“I had one minute to feel that I had won the race,” she added, “and every moment after that has been a nightmare.”
To many runners and race historians, Ms. Ruiz was less a feminist trailblazer than a brazen course-cutter and an unrepentant cheat. Some wrote her off as a mischievous prankster; others suggested she was deluded, struggling with mental illness. According to one theory, she had only wanted to cross the finish lane with the rest of the women, and her real mistake was winning.
“It was the last time we could have been fooled,” said marathon runner and race commentator Kathrine Switzer, who interviewed Ms. Ruiz on television after the race. “Women’s running was growing so fast and so excitingly, that there was still a chance that some unknown could emerge and win a race.”
“People called me and said, ‘This is such a setback for women,’” Switzer recalled by phone. “I said, ‘People haven’t even been paying attention to women. The reason she was allowed to cheat is nobody was paying attention to anyone except for the first 10 men at the Boston Marathon. At least now people are paying attention to what we do.’ ”
Ms. Ruiz was far from the first person to cheat at a marathon. Fred Lorz finished first at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, only to acknowledge that he was helped by hitchhiking roughly 10 miles after suffering from cramps. (It was all a “joke,” he said.) More recent contestants have been caught doping and biking across racecourses. Last month, the marathon world was rocked when Frank Meza, a 70-year-old runner, died by suicide, after his record time at the Los Angeles Marathon was disqualified amid accusations of cheating.
Ms. Ruiz’s victory was suspect from the beginning. In a post-race interview with Switzer, Ms. Ruiz said she had run in high school, quit because of a knee operation and only recently taken it back up, running 65 to 70 miles each week.
“Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals?” asked Switzer, using a common term for a speed-training technique. “Someone else asked me that,” Ms. Ruiz replied, crowned with the winner’s wreath. “I’m not sure what intervals are. What are they?”
In a separate interview, she explained: “I just got up this morning with a lot of energy.”
Two Harvard students ultimately helped uncover the ruse, reporting that they saw Ms. Ruiz emerge from the crowd near Commonwealth Avenue, not far from the finish. Soon after, the phrase “pulling a Rosie” became “a euphemism for finagling with infamy or finding a shortcut to success,” the Boston Globe reported, and Ms. Ruiz became one of the world’s best-known marathon runners.
“Great for our sport, isn’t it? Think of the two most famous marathoners — Pheidippides and Rosie Ruiz,” said Boston Marathon champion Bill Rodgers in an interview with the Globe. “One dropped dead and the other was crazy.”
But the episode “really did pay off for women,” Switzer said, spurring anti-cheating reforms and a separate start time for women at the Boston Marathon. “It matured us. It forced us to organize our sport better — and it forced us to understand that we were important enough to be cheated in.”
Ms. Ruiz was born in Havana on June 21, 1953, and was 8 when she came to the United States. (Accounts vary on her birth name: She once told the Globe it was Maria Morales, but an aunt told the newspaper it was actually Maria Rosario Ruiz.) According to her family obituary, “she was separated from her mother and lived with cousins, aunts and uncles in Hollywood, Fla.”
“There was nothing for me to do but run,” Ms. Ruiz later said, recalling her upbringing near Miami. “It was an escape for me.”
She played piano and studied music at Wayne State College in Nebraska before settling in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant for a metals company. She said she was recovering from surgery to remove “a tumor on my skull” when she qualified for the Boston Marathon.
“As I saw it, and several of my colleagues saw it, she wanted to be part of the ‘in’ group at the office, and running was her attempt of being accepted,” her boss at the time, John Emptage, later told the Globe.
Ms. Ruiz went on to work as a client representative at the Laboratory Corporation of America, an accreditation specialist at the Better Business Bureau, and as a real estate agent and public notary, according to her family.
But she struggled at times with the law, making national headlines in 1982 when she spent a week in jail (later receiving five years’ probation) after being accused of stealing cash and checks from her employer in Manhattan. The next year, she was arrested and accused of trying to sell cocaine to undercover narcotics agents and received another two years’ probation.
Her marriage to Aicaro Vivas ended in divorce. Survivors include her partner, Margarita Alvarez, whom she met in 1988; three sons; and a brother.
In a 1998 interview with the Palm Beach Post, Ms. Ruiz said she still had her Boston Marathon medal and watched the event each year, calling herself “a masochist” while continuing to insist she had completed the marathon.
By then, however, an old friend had contradicted her story, telling the Globe that Ms. Ruiz had confided to him six or nine months after the marathon that she had sneaked onto the course near the finish line. The friend, running-club leader Steve Marek, said Ms. Ruiz told him she covered herself with water to make it look like she had been sweating.
“She jumped out of the crowd, not knowing that the first woman hadn’t gone by yet,” Marek said. “Believe me, she was as shocked as anyone when she came in first. But at that point they had put the crown on her, gave her the medal and told her she’s the winner. How could she say, ‘No, I’m not’?”
harrison.smith@washpost.com


Running Commentary

Running Commentary

Whether the GOP vice presidential candidate purposely lied or just has a bad memory, the story had legs — particularly among Willey’s readership. “Runners are upstanding, responsible, goal-oriented people who put pride into efforts and times,” he says. “He tried to claim credit for an achievement without doing the work. That violated their unspoken code.” Will it affect the results of today’s election? Probably not, Willey says, but he thinks runners as a voting bloc will cast their ballots with a few specific issues in mind, including the environment and health care. Personally, he’d like to see running used as a public policy in the fight against obesity. “It’s the best and quickest way to get kids moving,” Willey says. “You can really tell a lot about the person by what kind of runner he or she is,” says Willey, who notes the major differences between the presidents’ styles. While W liked to go out in 100-degree-plus weather and rarely had anyone other than his security detail tag along, Clinton used his jogs as social events, inviting other folks to join in and often ending with a bite at McDonald’s. Willey finds it unremarkable that so many presidents have been runners. (“It’s not as though they’re stamp collectors. There are a lot of runners in America.”) What amazes him is that more politicians don’t run. “Running sends the message that a president is healthy, vigorous and active,” Willey says. “It’s also incredibly egalitarian and democratic. You can do it anywhere, and it doesn’t take a lot of time.” That’s important when your schedule includes running the country.

The news about running hasn’t been so hot recently. There’s the Michigan dentist who’s been labeled a “marathon fraud” for his questionable wins. There’s the competitive runner who was caught injecting EPO. Even the Lance Armstrong scandal has extended to his marathon times, which are likely to get wiped from the record books.
“There’s lying and cheating in the air. It must be a presidential election year,” jokes David Willey, editor-in-chief of Runner’s World, which unexpectedly had a scoop this summer when it found that Paul Ryan had fudged his claim that he’d run a marathon in less than three hours.
Whether the GOP vice presidential candidate purposely lied or just has a bad memory, the story had legs — particularly among Willey’s readership.
“Runners are upstanding, responsible, goal-oriented people who put pride into efforts and times,” he says. “He tried to claim credit for an achievement without doing the work. That violated their unspoken code.”
Will it affect the results of today’s election? Probably not, Willey says, but he thinks runners as a voting bloc will cast their ballots with a few specific issues in mind, including the environment and health care. Personally, he’d like to see running used as a public policy in the fight against obesity.
“It’s the best and quickest way to get kids moving,” Willey says.
It’s also an effective regimen for presidents, who don’t just run for office but also for exercise, stress relief, mental clarity and a host of other benefits, he says. The November issue of Runner’s World features an interview with former Secret Service agent Nick Trotta, who ran with President Bill Clinton and both Presidents Bush.
“You can really tell a lot about the person by what kind of runner he or she is,” says Willey, who notes the major differences between the presidents’ styles. While W liked to go out in 100-degree-plus weather and rarely had anyone other than his security detail tag along, Clinton used his jogs as social events, inviting other folks to join in and often ending with a bite at McDonald’s.
Willey finds it unremarkable that so many presidents have been runners. (“It’s not as though they’re stamp collectors. There are a lot of runners in America.”) What amazes him is that more politicians don’t run.
“Running sends the message that a president is healthy, vigorous and active,” Willey says. “It’s also incredibly egalitarian and democratic. You can do it anywhere, and it doesn’t take a lot of time.”
That’s important when your schedule includes running the country.


Chicago and London marathon winner reportedly paid Russian officials $550,000 to keep her doping secret

Lilya Shobukhova. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP) Shobukhova has won the Chicago Marathon three times, from 2009 to 2011, as well as the London Marathon in 2010. Less than two years later, Shobukhova was stripped of her Chicago and London wins after Russian doping officials discovered suspicious blood samples in her biological passport in April of this year. As a consolation payment, ARD reports, Shobukhova’s husband received a refund of $370,000 from the Russian athletics federation, which had allegedly been using the money to bribe officials at the Russian Anti-Doping Agency to falsify positive tests. Apparently, at least one official couldn’t be bribed. The main accusations come from former Russian Anti-Doping Agency official Vitaly Stepanov and his wife Yulia, a former runner herself who was once banned for doping. Per the Associated Press: Stepanov told ARD that various Russian sports federations “would come to (Russian) doping control officers” offering “extra cash” to hush up positive tests. He also accused the head of the national doping test laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, of falsifying tests and selling banned substances. Yulia Stepanova accused coaches of providing her with banned substances. Yulia Stepanova also accused the head of the Russian federation’s medical department, Sergei Portugalov, of supplying doping products in exchange for 5 percent of an athlete’s earnings, plus bonuses for competition wins. She also said Russian athletes had avoided out-of-competition testing by using false names during foreign training camps. The story, however, doesn’t end there. The ARD report states the behavior could be endemic and could implicate Russian officials and athletes in other sports, such as swimming, cycling, biathlon, weightlifting and cross-country skiing, the AP writes. “These are serious allegations. I understand an investigation is already under way by the IAAF ethics commission and we await the full findings,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told AP. “Should there be anything affecting the International Olympic Committee and our code of ethics we will not hesitate take any and all action necessary.” The Russian athletics federation and Russian Anti-Doping Agency, both of which are overseen by the Russian government, have not commented, neither to the foreign press nor to Russian publications that have also picked up the story. (H/t: Sport.ru)

Lilya Shobukhova. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Liliya Shobukhova is a good runner. But she wanted to be better. She wanted to win. So she started doping, and to keep her secret quiet, the 37-year-old reportedly paid Russia’s athletics federation $550,000 to help her cover up a positive test, according to the Associated Press, which cites German and French news sources.
Shobukhova has won the Chicago Marathon three times, from 2009 to 2011, as well as the London Marathon in 2010.
According to France’s L’Equipe sports newspaper and German television channel ARD, which claims to have undercover video of Shobukhova admitting to using oxandrolone, a banned steroid, the money Shobukhova reportedly paid the Russian athletics federation is what led Shobukhova to be able to compete in the 2012 Olympics, where she entered but failed to finish the marathon event.
Less than two years later, Shobukhova was stripped of her Chicago and London wins after Russian doping officials discovered suspicious blood samples in her biological passport in April of this year. As a consolation payment, ARD reports, Shobukhova’s husband received a refund of $370,000 from the Russian athletics federation, which had allegedly been using the money to bribe officials at the Russian Anti-Doping Agency to falsify positive tests. Apparently, at least one official couldn’t be bribed.
The main accusations come from former Russian Anti-Doping Agency official Vitaly Stepanov and his wife Yulia, a former runner herself who was once banned for doping. Per the Associated Press:
Stepanov told ARD that various Russian sports federations “would come to (Russian) doping control officers” offering “extra cash” to hush up positive tests. He also accused the head of the national doping test laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, of falsifying tests and selling banned substances.
Yulia Stepanova accused coaches of providing her with banned substances.
Yulia Stepanova also accused the head of the Russian federation’s medical department, Sergei Portugalov, of supplying doping products in exchange for 5 percent of an athlete’s earnings, plus bonuses for competition wins. She also said Russian athletes had avoided out-of-competition testing by using false names during foreign training camps.
The story, however, doesn’t end there. The ARD report states the behavior could be endemic and could implicate Russian officials and athletes in other sports, such as swimming, cycling, biathlon, weightlifting and cross-country skiing, the AP writes.
“These are serious allegations. I understand an investigation is already under way by the IAAF ethics commission and we await the full findings,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told AP. “Should there be anything affecting the International Olympic Committee and our code of ethics we will not hesitate take any and all action necessary.”
The Russian athletics federation and Russian Anti-Doping Agency, both of which are overseen by the Russian government, have not commented, neither to the foreign press nor to Russian publications that have also picked up the story.
(H/t: Sport.ru)


How accurate was the 2020 reporting of COVID-19 in Mexico?

Several factors contributed to under-reporting COVID-related cases and deaths in Mexico.  One factor was that Mexico only included fatalities confirmed with a lab test. Hospitals were understaffed and often people died at home so those deaths were not counted as COVID deaths.  Also, due to Mexico's informal economy where more than 50 per cent of the workforce does not have government benefits meant that this sectors' COVID cases and deaths were under-reported.  Further, understaffed hospitals could not keep up with the massive amount of COVID-patients and the associated documentation.  Although the US-Mexico border was closed to vehicular traffic, air travel to Mexican resorts did not require COVID tests or quarantine time.  Therefore COVID cases associated with these travelers was not reported.  Documents must include relevant information about the US-Mexico border.

Find a document that explains reasons for a specific under-reporting issue.

Trump weighs blocking Americans at the Mexico border, but legal authority is shaky and no decision has been made

A Trump administration proposal
While the executive branch has broad authority to close border crossings or restrict travel in the event of a spreading disease outside U.S. territory, it is less clear how the Trump administration could justify such restrictions on U.S. citizens when infection already is spreading rampantly inside the United States.
Administration officials familiar with the internal discussions said some Trump administration officials want to stem the spread of covid-19 by reducing the hundreds of thousands of daily border crossings by U.S. citizens and green-card holders, many of whom reside in Mexico and work in the United States.
The Trump administration already has tried to ban nonessential travel across the border, but it has little ability to enforce measures that would bar Americans from entering. About 400,000 people continue to go back and forth each day, officials said, about half the pre-pandemic volume.
Blocking those U.S. citizens and permanent residents from returning would be an extraordinary step, but President Trump has long viewed border closures and travel restrictions as a demonstration of strength and executive prerogative. Trump has repeatedly pointed to his Jan. 31 order halting travel from China in defending his handling of the pandemic.
The difference now is that the United States has the world’s worst outbreak, with more than 5 million confirmed coronavirus cases. Medical experts have warned the administration that barring American citizens from entering their own country would do little to change that.
One Department of Homeland Security official familiar with the discussions played down the border proposal, saying it likely would be more of a travel advisory than a rigidly enforced ban, similar to New York State Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s call for out-of-state visitors to quarantine for 14 days.
“We know it would be very hard to police,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. “But in some ways there is a benefit to having an order in place, even if everyone knows you can’t enforce it, because the vast majority of Americans will follow the rules.”
Some administration critics have doubted the seriousness of the proposal, because border officials would have to establish a process for screening travelers for illness and coming up with parameters for denying their entry. Public health authorities could establish a more obligatory quarantine system, but denying Americans the ability to enter the United States on the basis of their mere presence in Mexico would land quickly in federal court.
“Any proposal that would bar citizens or lawful permanent residents from returning to the United States would be unconstitutional,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who has successfully challenged several of the Trump administration’s border and immigration measures.
“The administration should focus less on bans and more on genuinely helpful public health measures,” Gelernt said, calling the White House “ban-happy.”
Officials at the White House and DHS have been discussing such restrictions for weeks, according to two officials involved in the talks. They said the measures likely would be issued in the form of an order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not unlike the public health emergency used to implement a policy of mass expulsions for unauthorized migrants attempting to enter.
Two officials said White House immigration adviser Stephen Miller is not behind the proposal and has been focused instead on the Trump administration’s law-and-order campaign in Portland, Ore., and other U.S. cities. The proposal is not being actively considered at the top levels of the White House, one official said, cautioning that it has not gone through the “traditional White House policy process.”
The initiative is “not necessarily a good election move for us,” one official said. “I can't imagine we would actually do it.”
DHS officials declined to comment on the discussions.
Border closures and travel restrictions have been a preferred policy tool of the president’s from his first week in office, when the administration attempted to bar travelers from majority-Muslim countries. Those restrictions were scaled back, and while federal courts have upheld the administration’s authority to restrict entries on national security grounds, Trump has not tried to place broad limits on the ability of American citizens to enter their own country.
“I could see a scenario where a court might uphold it, like an Ebola outbreak in Mexico that amounted to a true public health emergency,” said John Sandweg, who served as the top attorney at DHS under President Barack Obama. “But it’d be very hard to bar U.S. citizens from entering based on covid. At this point, the barn door is wide open, and to say to a U.S. citizen that you can’t return home because you’ve been exposed, I don’t see how that’s constitutional.”
A system that would selectively screen out some travelers based on a suspicion of covid-19 infection also appears unworkable, according to others involved in the discussions. U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel have the ability to question travelers and perform cursory inspections, but because large numbers of covid-19 carriers are asymptomatic, the effectiveness of such screenings is questionable. Temperature checks are considered unreliable as well, because many infected carriers do not have fevers or develop them well after they are already contagious.
Some of the U.S. cities and counties along the Mexico border have been among the hardest-hit by the pandemic, especially in Arizona and the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Those areas could be hurt even more by border closures, because they depend heavily on cross-border trade and many essential workers — including in hospitals and health care — who live in Mexico.
The official said the strongest thing they could anticipate would be a kind of federal “stay at home” order from the CDC telling travelers on both sides of the border to avoid crossing into the other country “unless you have a good reason” such as a school, work or a medical appointment. The goal would be to reduce some of the daily volume of travelers without severely disrupting local economies or triggering a cascade of lawsuits.
CBP officials at ports of entry could interview travelers to determine whether their trip would be essential, and then potentially turn them back if they acknowledge the purpose of the trip does not meet that threshold. “If you’re just coming for the day to shop and eat, and then leave, you can’t do that,” the DHS official said.
The screenings would have to function “on the basis of the honor system,” the official cautioned, acknowledging that CBP officers would have limited ability to turn back U.S. citizens who profess to be traveling for essential purposes, even if officers doubt their claims.


Mexico to start reopening border region, other areas as coronavirus lockdown eases

Long lines form outside a wholesale market in Ciudad Juárez on May 8, 2020. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters) MEXICO CITY — [¡Caray! Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry] The Iztapalapa neighborhood in Mexico City on May 8, 202. (Edgard Garrido/Reuters) mary.sheridan@washpost.com Read more Coronavirus on the border: why the U.S. has so many more cases than Mexico As coronavirus fears grow, doctors and nurses face attacks Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexican hospitals spark protests Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

Long lines form outside a wholesale market in Ciudad Juárez on May 8, 2020.  (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

MEXICO CITY —
The country has been on a nationwide lockdown for more than seven weeks, and businesses are eager to reopen. Analysts are predicting that the economy could shrink up to 10 percent this year — one of the most significant recessions in Latin America.
“We’ve begun a new stage. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Under the plan, the government would allow 269 municipalities scattered over 15 states to resume most activities on Monday. These are places that have had no confirmed coronavirus cases and whose neighboring counties also have no sign of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. They represent just over 10 percent of all municipalities in Mexico.
The rest of the country will be assigned a color starting June 1 that indicates the extent to which businesses, schools and public gathering places can reopen. In addition, three major industries will be included on the list of “essential” sectors that can resume operations nationwide — construction, mining and auto manufacturing.
Mexico has had significant outbreaks in five cities, including Mexico City, the epicenter. As of Tuesday, the government had logged nearly 4,000 confirmed deaths from covid-19. Authorities have said that the actual number is certainly higher.

[¡Caray! Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry]

The lockdown in Mexico has been less severe than in many other Latin American countries, relying on persuasion rather than police or soldiers to keep people home. Schools and most businesses and government offices have had to close, however. Authorities say the restrictions have prevented a nationwide spike in cases, although the virus continues to spread through the country.
Officials indicated that Mexico City will remain “red” — the highest level of lockdown. Three big states on the U.S. border, in contrast, are considered “green” — Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. If they remain in that category, they will be able to resume manufacturing and other business activities in June, and schools in those states will reopen. New safety measures will be in place to discourage transmission of the virus.

The Iztapalapa neighborhood in Mexico City on May 8, 202. (Edgard Garrido/Reuters)

The Trump administration has been urging Mexico to restart assembly plants that provide inputs for critical U.S. industries such as defense contractors. Mexico has been wary since dozens of workers have become sick at border factories that remained open. Several have died.
Baja California is considered “red” because of a coronavirus outbreak in the city of Tijuana, south of San Diego.
The two other border states — Sonora and Tamaulipas — are “yellow,” meaning that businesses can reopen but schools will remain closed and restrictions on gathering places, including churches and parks, will continue.
Many of Mexico’s popular beach destinations — Acapulco, Cancun, Playa del Carmen — are in “red” states, meaning hotels and restaurants will probably not reopen for weeks. Tourism accounts for about 8 percent of the economy.
Officials cautioned that shutdowns could be reintroduced in states or municipalities if cases flare up again.  They believe that Mexico City and Cancun recently passed their peaks of new cases and that the epidemic will ebb in those cities in the coming weeks.
But Hugo López-Gatell, the Health Ministry official who has designed Mexico’s strategy, acknowledged that much was still unknown about the path of the virus.
“In every moment, there is uncertainty,” he said. “Every country in the world faces the question of whether you can head into the new normality, and at what speed.”

mary.sheridan@washpost.com

Read more

Coronavirus on the border: why the U.S. has so many more cases than Mexico

As coronavirus fears grow, doctors and nurses face attacks

Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexican hospitals spark protests

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Mexican governors want tighter border controls to keep Americans from bringing coronavirus south

MEXICO CITY —
For years, officials in northern Mexico watched as a border wall rose just north of the Rio Grande, and as the White House threatened repeatedly to freeze cross-border traffic.
Now, with coronavirus cases soaring in the southwestern United States, it’s Mexican leaders who are asking for tighter border enforcement to keep their communities safe.
“The situation is very bad in Texas and [cross-border travel] would only bring us problems in northern Tamaulipas,” said Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, the governor of Tamaulipas state, who tested positive for the virus this week.
García Cabeza de Vaca and other border governors have pleaded with Mexico’s central government to better vet people entering Mexico from the United States, to ensure that their trips qualify as “essential travel.”
While the United States has applied that designation relatively strictly since March — allowing entry only to noncitizens and nonresidents whose jobs are deemed critical — Mexican border officials rarely question travelers entering the country. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans have continued crossing the border into Mexico for recreational purposes — including visiting relatives and going shopping. Mexican officials are worried such visits will surge during the Fourth of July weekend, a dangerous vector for the virus to enter the country from the United States.
As cases have increased in Southern California, Arizona and Texas, Mexican border states have increasingly come to see the outbreak in the United States as their biggest threat in controlling the epidemic.
Citing no evidence, President Trump has said that the border wall would keep infections from entering the United States from Mexico. But given the soaring U.S. caseload, it is Mexico that has more reason to fear the virus coming across the border.
On Thursday, the Mexican government said it would be installing “sanitary filters,” where travelers from the United States will have their temperatures checked at several border crossings. Those checkpoints have “the goal of protecting the health of the Mexican population, particularly those in the border states,” said a statement from the Mexico Foreign Ministry.
Officials in Mexico’s border states have gone further, pleading for people not to cross the border at all.
Enrique Clausen, Sonora state’s health minister, said he would seek to apply more stringent controls on border crossings than those mandated by Mexico’s federal government.
“It’s so important to implement the necessary measures to protect the health of Sonorans. And one of them, at this moment, has to be reducing the border crossings from the United States toward Mexico,” Clausen said during a news briefing Tuesday. Two days later, he too tested positive for the virus.
On Thursday, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, echoed that message in Spanish, addressing U.S. citizens living along the border in a video posted on Twitter. He advised Americans to avoid cross-border travel during the Fourth of July weekend.
“In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have crossed the land border every day and 90 percent of them are U.S. citizens or green-card holders,” he said. “If this traffic doesn’t decline, there will be an increase, not a decrease, in travel restrictions.”
The U.S. government has continued deportations to Mexico throughout the pandemic. In many cases, deportees have tested positive for the coronavirus after entering Mexican territory. Those deportations have further infuriated Mexican officials who have tried to restrict Americans from visiting the country.
“Why are they continuing these deportations in the middle of a deadly pandemic, including people who are already sick and who knows how many asymptomatic people,” Maki Ortiz, the mayor of the Mexican city Reynosa, told The Washington Post in May.
U.S. border states have a significantly higher rate of infection than Mexican border states, although with limited testing in Mexico, it is difficult to compare the numbers.
Tamaulipas, with a population of 3.5 million, has had 5,712 confirmed coronavirus cases. Sonora, with a population of 2.85 million, has had 7,064
Texas has a population of 29 million and more than 175,000 confirmed coronavirus cases. Arizona has a population of 7.3 million people and more than 90,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.
In June, Trump said at a rally in Phoenix that the Mexican city of Tijuana was “heavily infected with covid” and that the border wall was preventing cross-border transmission. In fact, San Diego had more cases of the virus per 100,000 residents.
Some U.S. citizens and permanent residents who live in Mexico are crossing the border to be treated in American hospitals, placing a disproportionate stress on small community hospitals in places like Imperial County, Calif. U.S. border restrictions still allow Americans to cross the border into their own country without citing a reason.


Coronavirus on the border: Why Mexico has so few cases compared with the U.S.

[Leer en español]
MEXICO CITY —
The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a region of contrasts. But people in both countries are puzzling over the latest one: The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus on the Mexican side is just a small fraction of the U.S. count.
On Sunday, confirmed cases in California topped 6,200, compared with just 23 in Baja California. Arizona had 919 cases, dwarfing the 14 in neighboring Sonora. New Mexico reported 237 cases; in Chihuahua state, there were six.
The U.S.-Mexico border is the busiest in the world, with an estimated 1 million legal crossings per day. The neighbors’ economies are intertwined.
So why is there such a big difference in cases?
The disparity reflects, in part, a time lag. Mexico did not report its first case until Feb. 27 — a month after the virus was detected in the United States. To date, the country has counted 993 cases, less than 1 percent of the U.S. total.
But Mexico is also pursuing an unorthodox strategy. It is relying less on tests, and more on its own disease modeling, to guide its response to the pandemic. As Central American neighbors declared emergencies in mid-March, Mexico kept its airports, shops and government offices open — the government didn’t urge a broad stay-at-home policy until last week.
Mexico’s approach amounts to a bet, its coronavirus czar acknowledges — “a bet that’s technically sound,” Hugo López-Gatell said in an interview. Authorities are wagering that they can fine-tune their response to the virus, even as it has outwitted health officials in the United States and Europe.
The stakes of that gamble are enormous. Mexico held off on harsh lockdown measures to allow citizens to work for a few more weeks. Nearly 60 percent of the labor force works in the informal sector — as plumbers, gardeners, taco vendors — and they have little or no savings.
Keeping those workers home when it’s not absolutely necessary, López-Gatell said, can cause “frightening damage.”
But if it turns out Mexico waited too long to introduce restrictions, analysts warn, it could suffer a crisis like Italy’s or New York’s — with far fewer resources. Mexico has half as many hospital beds per capita as the United States, and a quarter as many nurses, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“The health system will be overloaded much faster” than in other countries, Eduardo González-Pier, a former Mexican deputy health minister, said last week in a briefing sponsored by the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Turmoil in Mexico typically generates fears of spillover  in the United States — surges in illegal migration and narcotics, snags in trade. At the moment, though, it is Mexicans who are worrying about crossover problems. On Saturday, governors of three Mexican border states called on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to tighten controls to limit the arrival of the coronavirus from the United States.
Mexico has extensive experience with infectious diseases; it was the epicenter of the 2009 swine flu pandemic. But unlike many nations, it has not rushed to scale up testing. López-Gatell, a respected epidemiologist with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University — an institution currently distinguishing itself with a widely cited website tracking the pandemic — acknowledged that Mexico’s official count does not reflect the real number of cases.
“Any country in the world that takes public health seriously knows there’s a portion of the epidemic that’s visible, and a portion that’s not visible,” he said.
How deep is the undercount? Academic studies estimate that there are 10 to 15 times as many common flu cases each year as reported, López-Gatell noted.
But the raw numbers aren’t the point, he maintained. What matters, he said, is identifying when and where the virus starts to grow exponentially. Figuring that out is a bit like conducting a presidential election poll, he said. “You don’t interview 300 million Americans,” he said. “There’s a scientific method to know what is the size” of the sample needed for an accurate survey.
From the start of the outbreak, Mexican authorities tested likely coronavirus carriers — people with symptoms such as fever and dry cough who had recently visited a country with known cases. When a diagnosis was confirmed, officials tried to track and isolate the victim’s contacts.
Authorities also watched for unusual spikes in seasonal flu cases. They didn’t spot any.
On March 24, Mexico declared that the virus had moved to a new phase and was spreading unchecked in communities.
Since then, monitoring stations around the country — in hospitals and primary-care centers — have been testing about 10 percent of suspected coronavirus patients with mild symptoms. Everyone with serious symptoms is tested, said López-Gatell.
“This allows you to have the information to construct estimates,” he said.
In total, Mexico has conducted about 65 tests per million inhabitants. That compares with 2,250 per million in the United States.
Mexico’s approach varies dramatically from the much-praised model of South Korea, which blunted the coronavirus curve through mass testing and aggressive tracking and isolation of victims and their contacts.
Carlos del Rio, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, says Mexico has moved too slowly.
“Countries that have done [extensive] testing are doing better than those that don’t,” said del Rio, the former head of the National AIDS Council of Mexico.
Alejandro Macias, Mexico’s former national flu commissioner, said there was not enough early testing to confidently determine when community transmission began. “I don’t think there was enough of a budget,” he said.
Others say testing has been overemphasized.
“It’s as though doing tests will solve the problem. That’s not clear at all,” said Samuel  Ponce de León, an infectious-disease specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “No one has been able to replicate” South Korea’s success, he said.
Of course, pinpointing when coronavirus cases started to explode was supposed to be only the first step in trying to tame the pandemic. The second was ordering tough measures to “flatten the curve” of illnesses and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Mexico closed down schools and most government offices last week, and urged citizens to stay indoors. By Saturday, though, the movement of people in Mexico City had declined by only 30 percent, López-Gatell told reporters. He pleaded with Mexicans to stay home.
“This is our last chance,” he said.
If Mexicans haven’t gotten the message, it might be partly the fault of the messenger-in-chief. For weeks, even as health authorities called on citizens to refrain from kissing and hugging, López Obrador plunged into crowds of admirers, slapping backs and shaking hands. He has only recently stopped his rallies.
State and local officials have criticized the federal government’s strategy. And there is plenty of skepticism about the case numbers.
But medical experts say there is little doubt there are more cases on the U.S. side of the border. Californians and Texans have more and closer ties with Europe and Asia — regions with big outbreaks — than people living in northern Mexico.
And in a telltale sign of the pandemic’s toll, Mexico has had just 20 deaths so far, compared with more than 2,500 for its northern neighbor.
If there were a dramatically higher number of cases, Ponce de León said, Mexican hospitals would be struggling with the same patient load currently overwhelming some U.S. hospitals. “And we don’t have that,” he said.
“We will have it,” he said. “But we’re at a different moment in the epidemic.”
mary.sheridan@washpost.com


Mexico adds 1,000 deaths to official coronavirus toll, most in a single day

MEXICO CITY —
Mexican authorities added more than 1,000 people to the country's official coronavirus death toll on Wednesday in an outbreak that's proving far more vicious than the government had anticipated.
The 1,092 deaths did not occur in one day. Rather, many of the death reports had been delayed — a common event as records make their way to the central government. A graph displayed at a Health Ministry news conference on Wednesday evening showed that the total deaths on any single day had not exceeded 350, so far.
But the figure was a startling indication of how the outbreak here has intensified. It was only Monday that the official count of people who died after testing positive for covid-19 surpassed 10,000. Now it stands at 11,279 — a two-day leap of more than 10 percent. Officials acknowledge the real total is higher, since many victims die before they can be tested.
Hugo López-Gatell, the senior Health Ministry official who has coordinated Mexico’s coronavirus campaign, told reporters the new figures had arrived from various hospitals, reflecting deaths from different dates. “Here we have a very old one, from some state, from March 25,” he said, pointing to the graph. It was not immediately clear why the tally might have jumped so dramatically in one day.
Mexican authorities have acknowledged that the virus is turning out to be more deadly than they had expected.
Mexico reported its first confirmed coronavirus cases on Feb. 28, a day before New York City. But while New York’s cases quickly skyrocketed, Mexico’s climbed more slowly. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last month that Mexico had “dominated” the pandemic.
Now the Mexican capital is at the epicenter of the country’s health crisis. Authorities have said new cases have reached a peak, with some signs of decline. Deaths, however, have stayed stubbornly high for days.
Mexico has followed a controversial policy of not seeking mass testing for the virus. Instead, authorities have predicted the pandemic’s course by watching cases at a sample set of medical centers around the country and constructing mathematical models. A lockdown was imposed on March 23, when officials said cases were starting to multiply.
Critics have said the quarantine should have been imposed earlier, and more strictly.
Many factors have contributed to the rising death toll. Mexico suffers some of the hemisphere’s highest levels of obesity, hypertension and diabetes, complicating factors for covid-19 that are often linked to the diets of the poor.
In parts of the country, residents have started leaving home more in recent days.
The country’s hospitals have strained to treat coronavirus victims. The government has massively expanded hospital capacity in recent months and hasn’t run out of beds. But the system has long been plagued by underinvestment and a lack of doctors and nurses.
Mexico ended its nationwide lockdown last weekend, replacing it with a system that gives more leeway to states with fewer cases. Still, the vast majority of the country remains in “red,” the danger category, with most offices, businesses and schools closed.


mary.sheridan@washpost.com

MEXICO CITY —
Mexico's government says it will lift a quarantine for hundreds of counties starting May 18 and will begin to gradually reopen the rest of the nation on June 1 as it seeks to emerge from the coronavirus epidemic.
The country has been on a nationwide lockdown for more than seven weeks, and businesses are eager to reopen. Analysts are predicting that the economy could shrink up to 10 percent this year — one of the most significant recessions in Latin America.
“We’ve begun a new stage. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference on Wednesday. But he cautioned that Mexico was headed for a “new normality” that would require safety measures to prevent major outbreaks of disease.
Under the plan, the government would allow 269 municipalities scattered over 15 states to resume most activities on Monday. These are places that have had no confirmed coronavirus cases and whose neighboring counties also have no sign of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. They represent just over 10 percent of all municipalities in Mexico.
Other municipalities and states will be assigned a color each week, starting June 1, that indicates the extent to which businesses, schools and public gathering places can function. In addition, three major industries will be included on the list of “essential” sectors that can resume operations nationwide next week — construction, mining and auto manufacturing.
Mexico has had significant outbreaks in five cities, including Mexico City, the epicenter. As of Tuesday, the government had logged nearly 4,000 confirmed deaths from covid-19. Authorities have said the actual number is certainly higher.
The restrictions in Mexico have been less severe than in many other Latin American countries, relying on persuasion rather than police to keep people home. Schools and most businesses and government offices have had to close, however. Authorities say the restrictions have prevented a nationwide spike in cases, although the virus continues to spread.
Some governors expressed concern that Mexico was reopening too early. “Everything is going to collapse, all the measures we have taken to keep people at home,” said Gov. Miguel Barbosa of Puebla, which is home to major Volkswagen and Audi plants.
Officials indicated that Mexico City will remain “red” — the highest level of lockdown. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said restaurants, department stores and cinemas would reopen in mid-June, at one-third capacity.
Three big states on the U.S. border, in contrast, are considered “green” — Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. If they remain in that category, they will be able to resume manufacturing and other business activities in June, and schools in those states will reopen.
The Trump administration has been urging Mexico to restart assembly plants that provide inputs for critical U.S. industries such as defense contractors. López Obrador, too, has been eager for a resumption of economic activity. Some Mexican officials have been wary, however, because dozens of workers have become sick at border factories that remained open. Several have died.
Baja California is considered “red” because of a coronavirus outbreak in the city of Tijuana, south of San Diego.
The two other border states — Sonora and Tamaulipas — are “yellow,” meaning that businesses can reopen but schools will remain closed and restrictions on gathering places, including churches and parks, will continue.
Many of Mexico’s popular beach destinations — Acapulco, Cancun, Playa del Carmen — are in “red” states, meaning hotels and restaurants will probably not reopen for weeks. Tourism accounts for about 8 percent of the Mexican economy.
While authorities issued a detailed plan on easing lockdowns, López Obrador said states would not be punished if they decided to establish their own rules.
And officials cautioned that shutdowns could be reintroduced in states or municipalities if cases flare up again. They estimate that Mexico City and Cancun recently passed their peaks of new cases.
Hugo López-Gatell, the Health Ministry official who has designed Mexico’s strategy, acknowledged that much was still unknown about the path of the virus.
“In every moment, there is uncertainty,” he said. “Every country in the world faces the question of whether you can head into the new normality, and at what speed.”
mary.sheridan@washpost.com


Latin America, unable to flatten its curve, struggles to cope with pandemic

BUENOS AIRES —
When ICU doctor Arnaldo Dubin left the sick and the dying at the end of another harrowing workday last week, the scene outside made him shudder.
Clusters of people, many without masks, were strolling and chatting under the Belle Epoque-style balconies of the capital’s fashionable Recoleta district.
Argentina is trying to return to “normal life” — the phrase President Alberto Fernández used when he announced new steps to ease one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns in July. Within days, long-cooped-up porteños were returning to hair salons, workplaces and psychiatrists’ couches. This month, the capital’s cafes and bars won permission to serve outside tables, bringing the sound of clinking wine glasses and beer bottles back to the city’s grand avenues.
But as Argentines emerge from their shells, they’re getting sick, undoing what had been one of the globe’s strongest  performances against the novel coronavirus. In less than two months, new cases have grown threefold, to top 12,000 a day.
“If there are more infections, we will not be able to handle them,” said Dubin, head of intensive care at Otamendi Hospital. “We are at our limit, and losing more and more of our colleagues to this fight.”
Seven months after Latin America diagnosed its first case of covid-19, the region continues to rack up some of the worst numbers in the world — failing to flatten its curve as it reels from persistently high infection levels and devastating mortality rates.
Brazil
The region suffers from a range of preexisting conditions. The population is more urbanized than in Europe, Oceania, Asia or Africa. Covid-19 has scythed its way through the urban slums of Sao Paulo in Brazil, Lima in Peru, Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
Close quarters and multigenerational households have undermined attempts at social distancing. Inequality is high, health care uneven and safety nets limited. The region’s many poor people must work to live, and they have routinely violated lockdowns to eat. Porous borders have made it difficult to quarantine infected travelers.
As in the United States, erratic leadership has also played a role, particularly in hard-hit Brazil under coronavirus skeptic Jair Bolsonaro and in Mexico under Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Some countries haven’t even tried contact tracing, which health experts say is key to containing the virus.
“Here, in the area where I live, there are huge families living all together, some in houses, and others just share rooms,” said Daniela Fonseca, 21, a public administration student in Colombia.
Fonseca, her mother, brother, sister and 2-year-old son all were infected in the rundown colonial-era home they share near downtown Bogota. They lost her 44-year-old father to the virus in July.
But despite rampant infections in the neighborhood, she said, “there’s still people walking around without face masks, people on the street corners drinking, having parties. . . . There really is a big lack of awareness.”
Indeed, analysts say, Latin American countries have suffered from the same divisive individualism that has hampered a unified coronavirus response in the United States.
In Colombia, people attended thousands of fiestas clandestinas — secret parties — as cases exploded in July. In Peru, a mayor undermined quarantine by going out, getting drunk, then playing dead in a failed attempt to avoid detection.
And in Brazil, where the virus has infected  4.2 million and killed more than  129,000, people have packed beaches, jammed into bars and flouted pleas to wear masks. A survey released this week found that a plurality of respondents blamed not Bolsonaro’s chaotic leadership nor local leaders for the country’s crippling outbreak, but other Brazilians. National leaders who have long criticized health guidelines as governmental overreach, meanwhile, have cheered the rule-breakers on.
“Crowded beaches don’t just show people’s willingness to have fun, but are also a message to aspiring dictators,” tweeted Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son. “People know what’s best for themselves, not hypocritical government leaders and authoritarians.”
Critics say fumbled, sometimes inexplicable government decisions have helped fuel the region’s failures.
Authorities in Mexico blame the country’s size for an outbreak that has infected more than  652,000 and killed more than 69,000. They hired more than 45,000 doctors, nurses and other health professionals in the early days of the crisis, and they boast that no coronavirus victims have been denied a bed.
But critics say Mexico’s epidemic has been more deadly than it would have been if authorities had conducted mass testing. And while the country locked down for 70 days starting in late March, it began reopening businesses while case numbers were still rising — in part because of pressure on the economy.
“Economic conditions forced a reopening that was too early,” said Malaquías López Cervantes, a public health expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Peru now has the highest coronavirus mortality rate per capita of any major country in the world. But because of limited testing, even its official tally of  more than 700,000 cases might be a gross underestimate. Infections, analysts say, might be as high as 7 million.
Peru’s disastrous performance might appear perplexing, given President Martín Vizcarra’s initially decisive response: an early and strict lockdown that put the economy into deep freeze. Restrictions including a national 10 p.m. curfew remain in force. Yet poverty, decades of underinvestment in health care and what critics say are strategic errors by the government — repressive policies enforced by the police and military, a complete lack of contact tracing, the failure to use targeted lockdowns for local outbreaks, and the lack of a communication strategy — have undermined the response.
Even as Peru struggles to control its virulent outbreak, it is facing a constitutional crisis. Congress on Friday voted to open impeachment proceedings against Vizcarra amid allegations, denied by the president, of his involvement in an influence-peddling scandal.
Only 20 percent of the nearly 3.3 million coronavirus tests administered so far in Peru have been the molecular tests that require a swab from the nose or throat, considered the best way to diagnose patients before they become contagious.
“We are missing too many asymptomatic people, never mind the people they have been in contact with,” said Dionicia Gamboa, a tropical-diseases expert at Cayetano Heredia University, Peru’s top medical school.
Argentina’s Fernández, who took office in December, imposed a strict national lockdown in March, halting international and domestic flights and buses, closing borders, and requiring people to isolate themselves even in the remote cities and towns of sparsely populated Patagonia.
At first, it seemed to work. Cases spread in the poor, densely populated villas miserias, or misery villages, of Buenos Aires, where residents did not have the luxury of following the rules.
“More than half of the residents in our villa have already got the virus,” said the Rev. Guillermo Torres, who lives in Villa 31, a slum beside a railway in the capital. The infected have included Torres and two fellow priests. “We knew it was going to happen.”
But national numbers remained relatively low compared with those of nearby Brazil, Chile and Peru — a development that boosted Fernández’s approval ratings. In one sense, the lockdown might have been too successful: The president soon faced mounting pressure from the opposition, and part of the public and the media, to ease the restrictions.
By May, children in Buenos Aires were allowed to leave their homes for one hour per weekend for “recreative walking.” In June, Fernández shifted from a policy of “mandatory isolation” to “mandatory social distancing.” Isolation remained in place for Buenos Aires and its suburbs, but local authorities allowed more stores to open and some sports to resume.
As infections edged upward, Fernández reimposed some restrictions. “They wanted to go out and run, and they went out and ran,” he said. “Now we see the consequences.”
But as the economic toll of locking down mounted, he allowed a phased easing of restrictions in July. Specifics have been left to local officials, subject to the approval of the national government. In Buenos Aires, for example, hairdressers, takeout service from bars and restaurants, and other professional services were allowed to reopen.
By late July, infections began to skyrocket in middle-class neighborhoods of the capital and expand more deeply into the provinces. Still, diners in Buenos Aires this month were allowed to eat at sidewalk tables at bars and restaurants. Masks remain mandatory in public, but the rule is routinely flouted.
Other restrictions remain. Domestic flights and long-distance buses are still idle, and malls, cinemas, schools and universities remain closed.
Argentine officials point to the country’s still relatively low mortality rate and say they have managed the curve, giving the country time to respond to a crunch period now, in part by expanding ICU beds by 41 percent since March.
The strict, early quarantine and phased reopening “allowed the number of cases and deaths to increase more slowly than in other countries, and thus prevented the health care system from collapsing,” Health Minister Ginés González García told The Washington Post in a statement.
But doctors are alarmed by the massive surge in cases.
On June 7, the country had recorded 22,794 infections.
Today, it has counted more than  524,000.
At Otamendi Hospital, the ICU ward is now at 100 percent capacity.  Nationwide, ICU wards are 62 percent full — compared with 45 percent in late June.
“We know that one in two patients will never wake up again,” Dubin said.


U.S.-Mexico border closure extended days after State Dept. lifts ‘do not travel’ advisory

Mexico announced Thursday that its border with the United States will remain closed for another month to further prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. The border closure was due to expire on Sept. 21.
The Mexican secretary of foreign affairs said that Mexico and the Unites States would continue the terms of that closure, which have been in place since March, until at least Oct. 21.
The announcement comes days after the State Department had lowered its travel advisory for Mexico to a Level 3 from a Level 4, the highest on the scale.
The border closure terms only apply to land and water crossings, as flights between the United States and Mexico have largely continued since the early days of the pandemic. Until last week, the State Department’s Mexico advisory was a Level 4 (do not travel) nationwide. Some less-visited regions of Mexico remain classified Level 4 for “crime and kidnapping.”
The modified travel advisory said U.S. travelers should “reconsider travel to Mexico due to covid-19” as well as “crime and kidnapping.” A border closure restricting nonessential travel has been in place between the United States and Mexico since March 21 in an effort to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
The popular resort areas of Cabo San Lucas, Cancún and Cozumel have been allowing U.S. travelers who fly into the country to visit without required quarantines or coronavirus tests. Instead, Mexican airports have been carrying out health-screening procedures such as temperature checks, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a Level 3 Travel Health Notice for Mexico due to COVID-19,” the advisory states. “Mexico has lifted stay at home orders in some areas and resumed some transportation and business operations. Visit the embassy’s COVID-19 page for more information on COVID-19 in Mexico.”
Mexico has seen a total of 668,000 coronavirus cases and more than 70,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, with daily new cases peaking in August before lowering and holding steady in the range of 4,000 to 6,000 per day since then. The United States has reported more than 6.5 million total coronavirus cases and 194,000 deaths, with the peak in daily new cases hitting mid-July, at more than 75,000.
Major tourist sites in Mexico have reopened, including Teotihuacán, a UNESCO World Heritage Site outside of Mexico City. The only area in Mexico that has a higher covid-19 rate than Mexico City is the tourist-frequented state of Baja California Sur, which includes Los Cabos. Subregions that have earned the World Travel and Tourism Council’s “Safe Travels stamp,” which certifies a locale follows health protocols established by the WTTC, include Los Cabos, Cancun, Riviera Maya, Riviera Nayarit, Yucatán, Jalisco and the islands of Cozumel.
Read more:
Where can Americans travel to in the Caribbean?
What to know about getting tested for the coronavirus to travel
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Coronavirus on the border: California hospitals overwhelmed by patients from Mexico

EL CENTRO, Calif. — When Manuel Ochoa started feeling sick — his body sore, his breathing restricted — he drove from his mother’s home in Mexicali, Mexico, to the U.S. border.
The 65-year-old retiree parked his car at the border crossing and tried to drag himself to the country where he has permanent residency, and where his health insurance is valid. Just before he approached the port of entry, he collapsed in the sun.
That’s when U.S. immigration officials made a call that has become increasingly common during the coronavirus outbreak: for an ambulance to transport a U.S. citizen or resident from the Mexican border to the nearest American hospital.
As Mexico’s health-care system has strained under the coronavirus, small community hospitals in Southern California, some of the poorest in the state, have been flooded with Americans who have fallen ill and crossed the border. They are retirees and dual citizens, Americans working in Mexico or visiting family there.
It is an example of how easily the virus moves between countries, even as governments — and particularly the Trump administration — have attempted to shut their borders. And it’s a window into how many American lives span the U.S.-Mexico border, including families who have moved freely across the region since before that line was drawn and whose movement has continued during the pandemic.
Public health issues have always straddled the border here. Texas conducts mosquito-spraying campaigns with the Mexican state of Tamaulipas during dengue outbreaks. Arizona has joint firefighting exercises with Sonora. California and Baja California have long battled a cross-border tuberculosis epidemic together. The San Ysidro border crossing, south of San Diego, is the busiest ambulance pickup point in the United States.
For years, the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission conducted simulations on how the two countries would respond if a pandemic settled on the border. A special procedure was created for Mexican ambulances to transfer patients to U.S. ambulances on American soil.
Then a real pandemic struck. Now, approximately half of the coronavirus patients in several California border hospitals, including El Centro Regional Medical Center, are recent arrivals from Mexico. As a result of that surge, Imperial County, home to El Centro, has a much higher concentration of coronavirus cases — 760 per 100,000 residents — than any other county in California.
“It’s amazing how this disease has taught us that borders don’t exist,” said Adolphe Edward, the chief executive of El Centro Regional. The hospital’s staff includes 60 people who cross the border from Mexicali each day to work.
About 1.5 million Americans live in Mexico, and more than 250,000 of them live in the cities just south of California. Those cities have been hit harder by the coronavirus than almost anywhere else in Mexico.
More than 300 medical personnel in Tijuana and its outskirts have been infected, according to Yanín Rendón Machuca, the head of the local health workers union. At the city’s general hospital, only a quarter of the staff remains at work. Ambulance drivers in Mexicali sometimes wait hours while hospital workers make room in hallways for patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Some overwhelmed public clinics in the border city are no longer accepting patients.
“We see patients who have been in Mexican hospitals for two, three or four days before they cross the border and come to us,” said Dennis Amundson, the medical director in the intensive care unit at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista, Calif.
U.S. citizens and green-card holders in northern Mexico started sharing messages and Facebook posts in groups such as “Rosarito Living” and “Expats in Mexico.” If you get sick, they say, cross the border.
So that’s what Ochoa did. He’s been a permanent resident of the United States since 1978. He retired a few years ago after a career as a truck driver in Los Angeles.
On Sunday morning, the ambulance drove him the 10 miles from the border to El Centro Regional, which was already treating 43 coronavirus patients and where a disaster response team was preparing to set up a military-style tent for overflow.
“This is where I have insurance, and it’s where there’s better attention,” he said at the hospital. The machine reading his resting heart rate bounced between 128 and 135 beats per minute.
During the pandemic, the influx of patients from Mexico has posed an unprecedented challenge. El Centro Regional normally serves a county with a population of about 180,000 residents, many of whom live below the poverty line. Suddenly, the hospital was responding to an additional community of Americans in Mexicali, thought to number 100,000 people.
When Edward posted a video update on Facebook last week explaining that his overwhelmed hospital would temporarily stop accepting covid-19 patients, he received a stream of messages criticizing him for prioritizing patients from across the border.
“Send them back to Mexico,” one person wrote.
“The border should have been closed from day one,” wrote another.
Edward, a former Air Force Medical Service Corps officer who helped lead the U.S. military’s medical team in Baghdad, tried to explain that these were Americans he was treating.
“We can pretend that 275,000 American retirees in Baja California don’t exist, but they do. Or the 35,000 military members,” he said.
The spike in cases along the border comes as California is trying to reopen. In San Diego on Memorial Day weekend, restaurants and bars were crowded with people, many not wearing masks. Medical experts warn that relaxing those rules, in addition to the cases coming across the border, could lead to a surge in infections.
“I expect Mexico to peak this month, but then as San Diego opens up, we’ll see an increase from that side as well,” said Juan Tovar, a physician chief operations executive at Scripps Mercy. “Our peak is going to depend on both of those factors.”
Among the patients who have come from Mexico in recent weeks is Patricia Gonzalez-Zuniga, a Tijuana physician who works frequently with the University of California at San Diego. Gonzalez-Zuniga and her husband were both diagnosed with covid-19 last month. Her husband’s health deteriorated rapidly.
“I have no doubt that he would have died if we had stayed in Tijuana and gone to a hospital there,” she said.
Others were U.S. citizens who took their children to Mexico for more-affordable child care. Some were Americans who had lost their jobs during the early weeks of the U.S. outbreak and went to live with relatives in Mexico to save money.
“That’s where they were infected,” said Amundson, the ICU medical director at Scripps Mercy. “And they came back to be treated here.”
Before the pandemic, more than 200,000 people per day crossed the border from Mexico to California. The Trump administration closed the border to “nonessential travel” in March, and President Trump promised to “suspend immigration” to halt the spread of the virus. But after an initial dip in entries, the pace has begun to bounce back. An average of 86,000 people per day crossed the border during the week of May 11 to 18, a mix of U.S. citizens and residents and Mexicans with legal work visas whose jobs are deemed essential.
No health screenings are being conducted at the border. When a Washington Post reporter crossed last week, an immigration agent looked at him and asked, “You’re not sick, are you?” before scanning his passport.
The Department of Homeland Security’s senior medical officer for operations, Alex Eastman, told medical professionals in Southern California this month that they should be prepared for U.S. citizens or permanent residents to continue to cross the border, including for medical treatment.
The federal government has dispatched teams from the National Disaster Medical System to the border to respond to the influx of patients. The California Department of Public Health has sent its own team. Some patients are being transferred as far north as Los Angeles to relieve border hospitals such as El Centro Regional.
Forty-eight percent of patients at Scripps Mercy in Chula Vista last week had visited Mexico in the week before they were admitted. In the hospital’s lobby hangs a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint.
“We don’t think the border should be closed, but we do think health checks and contact tracing would make a difference,” said Chris Van Gorder, the chief executive of Scripps Health, which runs the hospital. “What we don’t want is people going back and forth across the border and infecting other people.”
Last month, Van Gorder wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar asking them to apply pressure on Mexico to sharpen its public health response.
“We also need the federal government to put pressure on Mexico to enforce social distancing and shelter-in-place policies as we have done in the United States,” he wrote.
On the Texas-Mexico border, the dynamic appears to be inverted. Mexican officials have expressed concern that a growing outbreak in South Texas is spilling over into Tamaulipas, which had been largely spared during the pandemic.
The United States has deported thousands of people to Tamaulipas since March. In Reynosa, Mexico, the largest city in the state, at least 16 deportees have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Mayor Maki Ortiz. Before becoming mayor, she was Mexico’s undersecretary of health.
“Why are they continuing these deportations in the middle of a deadly pandemic, including people who are already sick and who knows how many asymptomatic people?” she said. Between the deportees and the thousands of dual citizens who cross the border every day, Ortiz worries her city will wind up importing a large outbreak from Texas.
“I say it as many times as I can on my television and radio messages: Stay in your homes and do not cross the border,” she said. “But when I look at the international bridges, I still see massive lines.”
In the nearby city of Matamoros, officials last week set up a checkpoint to question U.S. citizens crossing into Mexico and turned away some whose visits they deemed nonessential.
Some health experts say the epidemiological curves in border cities on both sides will eventually overlap.
“There are so many people crossing back and forth that it becomes one homogeneous rate,” said Arturo Rodriguez, the public health director of Brownsville, Tex. “In other words, you have three rates: the U.S., Mexico and your border rate.”
Photos by Melina Mara. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Graphic by Chiqui Esteban. Design by Brianna Schroer. Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Adolphe Edward’s role in the Air Force. He was a Medical Service Corps officer.


State Dept. lifts ‘do not travel’ advisory for Mexico as border closure is due to expire

The U.S. State Department has lowered its travel advisory for Mexico to a Level 3 from its highest possible Level 4, days before the U.S.-Mexico border closure is due to expire on Sept. 21.
The modified travel advisory says U.S. travelers should “reconsider travel to Mexico due to covid-19” as well as “crime and kidnapping.” A border closure restricting nonessential travel has been in place between the United States and Mexico since March 21 in an effort to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
The border closure terms only apply to land and water crossings, as flights between the United States and Mexico have largely continued since the early days of the pandemic. Until last week, the State Department’s Mexico advisory was a Level 4 (do not travel) nationwide. Some less-visited regions of Mexico remain classified Level 4 for “crime and kidnapping.”
The popular resort areas of Cabo San Lucas, Cancún and Cozumel have been allowing U.S. travelers who fly into the country to visit without required quarantines or coronavirus tests. Instead, Mexican airports have been carrying out health-screening procedures such as temperature checks, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a Level 3 Travel Health Notice for Mexico due to COVID-19,” the advisory states. “Mexico has lifted stay at home orders in some areas and resumed some transportation and business operations. Visit the Embassy’s COVID-19 page for more information on COVID-19 in Mexico.”
Mexico has seen a total of 668,000 coronavirus cases and more than 70,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, with daily new cases peaking in August before lowering and holding steady in the range of 4,000 to 6,000 per day since then. The United States has reported more than 6 million total coronavirus cases and 190,000 deaths, with the peak in daily new cases hitting mid-July, at more than 75,000.
The change comes soon after some major tourist sites in Mexico reopened, including Teotihuacán, a UNESCO World Heritage Site outside of Mexico City. The only area in Mexico that has a higher covid-19 rate than Mexico City is the tourist-frequented state of Baja California Sur, which includes Los Cabos. Subregions that have earned the World Travel and Tourism Council’s “Safe Travels stamp,” which certifies a locale follows health protocols established by the WTTC, include Los Cabos, Cancun, Riviera Maya, Riviera Nayarit, Yucatán, Jalisco and the islands of Cozumel.
“CDC recommends travelers avoid all nonessential international travel to Mexico. Travelers at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19 should consider postponing all travel, including essential travel, to Mexico,” according to the CDC website. “Local policies at your destination may require you to be tested for COVID-19 before you are allowed to enter the country. If you test positive on arrival, you may be required to isolate for a period of time. You may even be prevented from returning to the United States, as scheduled.”
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Mexico begins to life coronavirus lockdown, but officials say the country is still ‘in danger’

workers at Flex, a company that makes specialized harness products for the automotive industry, adjust their protective face masks while waiting to enter the plant in Ciudad Juárez on Monday, the first day of a gradual reopening of the economy for industries deemed essential. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters) [Coronavirus on the border: Patients from Mexico overwhelm hospitals in California] President Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaks at a news conference Monday at the facilities of the X Military Region in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. (Alonso Cupul/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock) [Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexico’s hospitals raise alarm, protests] People pass the time on benches in Mexico City on Sunday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP) [¡Caray! Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry] Commuters cross a pedestrian bridge in Mexico City on Monday. (Fernando Llano/AP) [Coronavirus hits Mexico’s economy where it hurts most: Oil, tourism, remittances and trade] Mexico City Police officers scuffle with colleagues during a protest over nonpayment of raises outside the office of Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images) Read more Coronavirus on the border: Why Mexico has so few cases compared with the U.S. Health workers attacked over fears of coronavirus The U.S. wants Mexico to keep its defense and health-care factories open. Mexican workers are getting sick and dying.

workers at Flex, a company that makes specialized harness products for the automotive industry, adjust their protective face masks while waiting to enter the plant in Ciudad Juárez on Monday, the first day of a gradual reopening of the economy for industries deemed essential. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

MEXICO CITY — Mexico on Monday lifted a 70-day coronavirus lockdown, but the federal and local governments replaced it with a contradictory patchwork of measures as the country struggles to contain the outbreak.
The nation’s coronavirus czar, Hugo López-Gatell, took a hard line, saying that federal guidelines on opening businesses would barely budge. Only a few industries — construction, auto manufacturing and mining — would be added to the list of “essential” businesses allowed to operate, he said.
“It’s vital that society understands that the danger continues,” he said.

[Coronavirus on the border: Patients from Mexico overwhelm hospitals in California]
But several governors defied the federal government’s orders, allowing shops and hotels in their states to open at least partially. Meanwhile, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador resumed his travel around the country with a visit to the Caribbean coast.
“We have to enter a new normality,” López Obrador told a news conference. “Our national economy, the well-being of our people need this.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaks at a news conference Monday at the facilities of the X Military Region in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. (Alonso Cupul/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Mexico has confirmed nearly 10,000 deaths directly linked to coronavirus, with an unknown number of other people perishing without a test. The Mexico City region has been hit hardest. López-Gatell says it’s starting to show signs of a decline in cases, but some scientists believe deaths could continue at elevated levels for weeks.
Mexico has suffered the second most coronavirus fatalities in Latin America, after Brazil, whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been a global outlier in downplaying the threat.

[Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexico’s hospitals raise alarm, protests]
Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, said López Obrador had failed to establish a coordinated national policy.
“He’s far from the terrible denialism of Bolsonaro and the brutal lack of responsibility of Donald Trump,” he said. But “he’s a politician who hasn’t managed to fit together the pieces of his strategy.”

People pass the time on benches in Mexico City on Sunday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

The Mexican leader initially appeared to minimize the coronavirus threat, holding crowded rallies and saying he was protected by religious tokens. He then largely turned over management of the pandemic to López-Gatell, a respected epidemiologist and senior Health Ministry official. On March 23, Mexico ordered businesses, government offices and schools to shut down.
Several governors broke with the federal government’s strategy from the start, saying it was too lax and imposing quarantines earlier. On Monday, some went in the opposite direction.
In the northern state of Nuevo Leon, officials allowed beer factories, hotels and shopping centers to resume some operations. In the western state of Nayarit, authorities permitted car dealerships, clothing stores and paint stores to operate at 30 percent capacity.

[¡Caray! Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry]
“Our state can’t survive being paralyzed any longer,” said Enrique Alfaro, the governor of the western state of Jalisco, which plans to open its businesses gradually.
Several governors cited economic concerns for reopening. In the face of the coronavirus, López Obrador has adopted one of the smallest stimulus packages of any country in Latin America, saying he wanted to avoid debt.
“López Obrador’s government is not crafting an economic strategy to protect jobs and businesses,” said José Antonio Crespo,  a political scientist at the Center for Research and Economic Policy.  “So many governors say, ‘I will.’ ”

Commuters cross a pedestrian bridge in Mexico City on Monday. (Fernando Llano/AP)

Mexico’s government has come under pressure not only from businesses and the unemployed — nearly 1 million people have lost jobs amid the country’s outbreak — but from the Trump administration. Mexico was more aggressive in shutting down some industries than in the United States, leading to shortages of parts for U.S. auto and aerospace manufacturers.
By Monday, officials said, more than 5,000 manufacturers of cars or transportation equipment had applied to reopen.
Authorities announced weeks ago that the lockdown would be terminated at the end of May. They appear to have underestimated how punishing the coronavirus would be. A month ago, López-Gatell predicted Mexico would suffer 6,000 deaths nationwide.

[Coronavirus hits Mexico’s economy where it hurts most: Oil, tourism, remittances and trade]
Officials now believe the country’s outbreak will probably not be a single, cataclysmic event. Instead, they say, outbreaks are likely to surge in different parts of the country at different times, as they have in the United States.
So the federal government has switched to a traffic light system in which states are labeled red, orange, yellow, or green
As of Monday, all but one state was red. Zacatecas was orange — some nonessential businesses and public spaces may reopen, but most restrictions remain in place.
Some jurisdictions added stricter measures. The mayor 0f Mexico City ordered residents to wear face masks in public. Men were advised to get rid of beards or mustaches, out of concern they could trap the virus.

Mexico City Police officers scuffle with colleagues during a protest over nonpayment of raises outside the office of Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)

While many Mexicans remained at home, López Obrador was on his first domestic trip in two months. He plans to spend several days in the Yucatán Peninsula, promoting construction of his Mayan train project to link popular attractions and boost tourism and jobs. He has said he’ll avoid crowds.
The president has been widely criticized for traveling amid a raging outbreak.
“It doesn’t seem to be a very coherent message,” Silva-Herzog Márquez said.

Read more

Coronavirus on the border: Why Mexico has so few cases compared with the U.S.

Health workers attacked over fears of coronavirus

The U.S. wants Mexico to keep its defense and health-care factories open. Mexican workers are getting sick and dying.


Lidl grocery store begins operations in US.

The German discount grocery chain began operations in northern Virginia in 2015.  Of interest are the grocer's plans to expand and compete with traditional grocery stores.  Exclude documents referring to the year 1980.

Find articles discussing this grocer's expansion plans related to the question.

Shoppers Food is leaving 13 locations. Here’s what is happening next.

After nearly a year of uncertainty, Shoppers Food & Pharmacy’s parent company announced this month that it is selling 13 stores to other grocery chains and shuttering four locations in the Washington region.
Employees and local officials protested that decision Tuesday, demanding new jobs for laid-off workers and new shopping options for residents as United Natural Foods Inc. — which bought Shoppers last year — considers plans for the chain’s remaining 26 locations.
“When you suffer, Prince George’s County suffers,” said Prince George’s County Council member Calvin Hawkins (D-At Large) at a rally Tuesday with union workers and politicians in front of the Shoppers in Landover. “It’s time to stop this foolishness.”
State Sen. Arthur Ellis (D-Charles) said he planned to work with leaders at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents the Shoppers workers, to introduce legislation in January that would give more protections to workers.
Currently, there are state recommendations that large companies provide 90 days’ notice before closing and offer employees retraining. But those are not legal requirements.
Local 400 spokesman Jonathan Williams said the union learned about the most recent round of closures minutes before they were publicly announced and “after we had been asking [company officials]for a meeting for almost a year.”
Williams said the union has been told that the Shoppers in Landover could close as early as Thursday — a decision that could leave its 72 employees without work heading into the holidays.
Signs posted in the windows Tuesday read: “Store closing,” “Everything on sale!” “Nothing held back!”
Inside, many of the shelves were bare.
UNFI, a major supplier for Whole Foods Market, is committed to reducing its retail footprint, chief executive Steven Spinner said in a statement this month announcing the sale of the 13 stores.
North Carolina-based grocer Compare Foods will take over the Shoppers location in Landover, in addition to those in Coral Hills and Colmar Manor in Prince George’s County and two locations in Baltimore, said general manager Leo Pena.
He said that Compare Foods will receive the keys to the stores around Jan. 10 and that the stores will open 30 to 45 days after that.
Pena said Compare Foods will offer “the same services as Shoppers, and more,” including free delivery. He said the store is considering renegotiating a contract with the union that serves Shoppers’ employees.
Lidl, a German grocery powerhouse that is rapidly expanding in the United States, plans to acquire six Shoppers locations, said spokesman William Harwood. Those sites are in Annapolis, Brooklyn Park, Oxon Hill, Takoma Park and Wheaton in Maryland and in Burke in Virginia.
“We will be making significant investments in the redevelopment of these sites, and will have more to share in terms of the grand opening timeliness and hiring events at the end of next year,” Harwood said in a statement.
The four Shoppers locations that are closing by the end of January are in Baltimore and Severn in Maryland, andAlexandria and Manassas in Northern Virginia. This summer, the chain’s outlet in Chillum, Md., shut its doors; a store in Falls Church, Va., closed Sept. 1.
Kevin Freeman, a butcher who has worked at Shoppers for 32 years, said the spirits of employees at the New Carrollton location where he now works are low, even though the fate of that location is unknown. “People don’t know where they are going to live — they are already living paycheck to paycheck.”
In Prince George’s County, which had 12 Shoppers locations, officials say they have been frustrated by the lack of information they have received from UNFI.
About 15 percent of the suburb is classified by the U.S. Agriculture Department as a “food desert,” and residents — especially in poorer communities inside the Beltway — have long complained about a dearth of healthy grocery options.
Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D), who has made bringing healthy foods to the county a top priority, said in a statement that she has been working to make sure all of the locations operating in Prince George’s are purchased by other grocers.
“We will be laser-focused on the high-quality grocers and dining options our citizens deserve,” she said. “We also understand the need for stability and job security for the hundreds of workers and their families who are impacted by these closures, especially during the holiday season.”
Williams, the union spokesman, said that according to the terms of the union’s contract, if a company buys more than 10 percent of the stores and opens within 30 days, then they also have to also buy the union contract. But he said he has little confidence that UNFI will adhere to that contract.
A spokesman for UNFI did not respond to requests for comment about the union contract.
Officials said there will be a resource fair Jan. 11 for affected workers to receive hardship funds and help applying for other jobs.
rachel.chason@washpost.com