A fragmented health system, socioeconomic and climate disasters aggravated COVID-19 in Mexico, while governance allowed alternative sanitary facilities

Abstract

The objective of this article reviews the complex impacts of COVID-19 not only as a health problem, but also related to unemployment, poverty rise, gender violence, and climate disasters in Mexico. An open, dissipative, and self-regulating system methodology interlinks the complex socioeconomic, political, and sanitary feedback. Governmental and private corruption in the purchase of drugs, protective gear, badly equipped and unbuilt hospitals after the 2017 earthquakes, lack of trained personnel, and people with comorbidity produced excess mortality. Support from private hospitals, ventilators, medical specialists from Cuba, vaccines bought worldwide, and the immunization of 71.3% of the adult population in 2022, reduced dead and contagion. The socioeconomic and health impacts were wide, when in 2020 12.5 million people lost their jobs, mostly women and youth, poverty raised, and lockdown increased intrafamilial violence. Governance included direct money transfers to elderlies, students, youth in apprenticeship, single mothers, and peasants planting timber and fruit trees. The cash steered youth away from organised crime, granted food security, and the acquisition of protective gear. New public works created employment in the poorest southern regions highly affected by COVID-19 due to undernourishment, improving their livelihood. Further, 52 cyclones on both oceans, forced people to flee, while the Trump Administration declared Art. 42 and returned migrants from different countries to the Mexican border, increasing the contagion. The Biden Administration gave vaccine gifts against COVID-19 to stimulate export industries in the northern region. The Russian-Ukrainian war raised prices that affected the food security of poor people. Agreements with supermarkets and food providers, systematic increases in the minimum wage, and new public infrastructure enhanced jobs, improved livelihood, and alleviate poverty. A rigorous macroeconomic policy allowed free vaccination also for children over five years and the building of an alternative public health system, providing sanitary and preventive medical attention to the impoverished population in the indigenous southern regions.