THREAD: If you've been watching COVID-19 in Mexico and have checked in on the graphs lately, you may be thinking that FINALLY the curve is bending and things are at long last starting to turn around.

But here's the graph to keep foremost in your mind when looking at the others.

As mentioned the other day, this is the graph format presented at nightly Health Secretariat press conferences. It shows all tests, color coded by results...and testing is down significantly from already very low numbers in proportion to outbreak size. https://twitter.com/SYoungReports/status/1295522053207011330

Mexico currently has the world's 3rd highest govt-acknowledged COVID death toll. The president govt calls journalists "alarmist" for reporting that fact, insisting on a framing that scales deaths to population. That may cease to be a talking point if/when India surpasses Mexico.

Back to the data. Testing is the basis of pandemic data, and Mexico has had a restrictive testing policy from the start. Here's how testing in Mexico compares to tests per 1,000 people in other countries. You may need to click to open to find Mexico's flat-ish line at the bottom.

Every country in the Western Hemisphere with a high death toll has cooked up its own recipe for failure. Mexico's has been to ignore and refute the evidence-based method of "test, trace & isolate". Consistency on this point has created the perception that testing isn't important.

At the same time, health officials have been notably sensitive about how their job performance is portrayed. It's dishonest to spin the situation here as a success, no matter what angle you take. For every benchmark of failure reached, a counter-narrative has been trotted out.

Much of this background is covered in this article I wrote a few weeks ago. Over the course of the month of July, deaths in Mexico surpassed those of Spain, France, Italy & the UK, rocketing Mexico into its current #3 global position in a matter of weeks. https://towardfreedom.org/story/few-tests-little-contact-tracing-as-coronavirus-spikes-in-mexico/

Let's circle back to the graph at the top. A closer look shows when already low testing rates started to fall. July was the pandemic's deadliest month thus far in Mexico. Testing hit its high point the 3rd week of July, then slid notably WHILE new cases and deaths remained high.

What was happening in the bigger picture in late July when testing dropped off? Mexico was about to surpass the UK in overall mortality, was rapidly moving up the "deaths per million" chart, undermining the official "scaled to population" framing. Data was evidence of failure.

How to bend a curve that's been steadily rising for months? One way would be to rethink a strategy that has proven itself to be ineffective & apply lessons of countries that have successfully managed outbreaks.

Another would be to further limit testing. Fewer tests=fewer cases.

Since most testing in Mexico is tied to a show of symptoms, there's a "chicken & egg" argument to be made about if reduced testing results from fewer people reporting illness. Aside from how it ignores asymptomatic spread, there's also the issue how many tests come back positive.

Side-by-side comparison of charts that show what happened with testing and positivity in Mexico from the July 23rd testing peak. Fewer tests, higher positivity. Mexico's positivity rate was already the world's highest. From an optics perspective, Mexico just remains in #1 spot.

Not only can a drop in testing result in fewer lab-confirmed cases, but it can eventually skew the data on deaths as well. Studies examining excess mortality in Mexico show govt-acknowledged Covid deaths constitute less than 1 in 3 deaths above historic averages in recent months.

Excess mortality will eventually give a clearer picture of Covid's toll on Mexico. The govt statistics bureau gets a copy of every death certificate, but it's not due to release mortality data from 2020 until late 2021. Thread on what has been released. https://twitter.com/SYoungReports/status/1289618267913326594

One final thing to mention with regards to emerging trends. Not only has testing plummeted overall in Mexico, but has disproportionately dropped in states where already high positivity rates indicated a LOT of Covid circulating. Charts by @ArturoErdely at https://sites.google.com/site/arturoerdely/covid19mx