Epidemiological Characteristics of COVID-19 in Mexico and the Potential Impact of Lifting Confinement Across Regions

Abstract

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has paralyzed our societies, leading to self-isolation and quarantine for several days. As the 10th most populated country in the world, Mexico is on a major threat by COVID-19 due to the limitations of intensive care capacities, about 1.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 citizens. In this paper, we characterize the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico and projected different scenarios to evaluate sharp or gradual quarantine lifting strategies. Mexican government relaxed strict social distancing regulations on June 1, 2020, deriving to pandemic data with large fluctuations and uncertainties of the tendency of the pandemic in Mexico. Our results suggest that lifting social confinement must be gradually sparse while maintaining a decentralized region strategy among the Mexican states. To substantially lower the number of infections, simulations highlight that a fraction of the population that represents the elderly should remain in social confinement (approximately 11.3% of the population); a fraction of the population that represents the confined working class (roughly 27% of the population) must gradually return in at least four parts in consecutive months; and to the last a fraction of the population that assumes the return of students to schools (about 21.7%). As the epidemic progresses, deconfinement strategies need to be continuously re-adjusting with the new pandemic data. All mathematical models, including ours, are only a possibility of many of the future, however, the different scenarios that were developed here highlight that a gradual decentralized region deconfinement with a significant increase in healthcare capacities is paramount to avoid a high death toll in Mexico.