Mexico’s federal government has acknowledged the rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Mexico but insists the situation is under control.
“Fortunately it is not serious,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said at his regular morning press briefing on Wednesday. “There are no hospitalizations and the most important thing is that there are no deaths.”
Data in Jalisco, however, suggests otherwise, with hospitalizations increasing by around 30 percent in the past two weeks, while confirmed Covid-19 cases are the highest since August of last year. Fortunately, fatalities have remained stable.
By mid-January, the Omicron variant will be responsible for about 80 percent of Covid cases in Mexico, according to Andreu Comas, an epidemiologist and respiratory virus specialist with the Mexican Consortium for Genomic Surveillance (CoViGen-Mex). The government-affiliated institution anticipates that infections will surge to around 64,000 active cases in the next few weeks, and between 120,000 and 180,000 in two weeks.
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