I've never seen Twitter users circle the wagons around Mexican govt data like it has around official statistics on the COVID-19 outbreak.

It's especially intense today after the NYT published a story questioning the official death toll in Mexico City.

The article in English is behind a paywall, but the version in Spanish is available here. It's one of three articles in major international publications today to cover the issue of potentially serious undercounts of COVID-19 cases in Mexico. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2020/05/08/espanol/america-latina/mexico-coronavirus.html#click=https://t.co/ruKfAYngr1

IMO a contributing factor to the wagon-circling is the popularity of the top official on Mexico's coronavirus response team. He's become arguably the most respected public official in the country. Dunking on reporters at his pressers has become a nightly Twitter pastime.

The official has earned this respect by conducting these nightly pressers in the first place; transparency that would've been unimaginable in past administrations. In the pressers he's patiently and articulately answered often repetitive and eye-roll worthy questions with grace.

But at the same time, valid questions regarding Mexico's ability to handle - much less successfully come out of - a crisis without timely identification of cases through widespread testing have been brushed off. The reporters who ask them get lumped into the dunk-on pile.

All of the countries that have quickly and successfully contained their outbreaks have relied on the 3-pronged strategy of testing, contact tracing and isolation of the sick. This is a proven scientific approach. To assume that any country can be an exception to that is politics.

Another factor behind the defensive reaction in Mexico to the intl reports questioning the COVID-19 death toll here could be the whiff of hypocrisy that comes from criticism launched from outlets based in cities (NYC & Madrid) with far more apparent outbreak mitigation failures.

The 'stay in your lane' sentiment is understandable, esp when the finger-pointing comes from within a country that has screwed up its pandemic mitigation strategy as bad as the US has, but those who live in places where it went wrong can tell us from experience what doesn't work.

Mexico's pandemic response is a mixed bag. The national strategy has been more uniform than in the US & implemented in a more timely fashion than in Spain.

Communication has been effective. But there's a lack of candid rationale behind the resistance to test, trace and isolate.

Mexico's coronavirus mitigation coordinator issues video response to today's intl news reports ahead of 7pm presser.

He notes Mexico is still developing official guidelines for postmortem determination of COVID19 as cause of death in untested individuals. https://mobile.twitter.com/HLGatell/status/1258872172380119040

Two troubling two scenarios could emerge from this flap. One, the large undercount of cases the govt acknowledges and we've come to accept will evolve into a resignation that we'll never have a remotely accurate census of those lost. We already saw this happen with the Drug War.

Two, politicization of pandemic response. Up until now, Mexico has thankfully been spared the ideological polarization witnessed in the US. While some pundits do play politics, it's become too easy to dismiss valid concerns and questions as motivated by political opposition.