Scattered Flu Stuff

Mexico City has now had two consecutive days without a death from the flu, which would seem to be a sign of life returning to normal. Via Mexfiles, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some officials think the virus may have originated in California, not in Mexico. Two pieces from yesterday's NY Times are worth mentioning: David Lida's dispatch from a Mexico City cantina, and a write-up of Google's new Mexico flu tracker. Lastly, Mexican telenovelas suspended kissing scenes earlier this week. I would have mentioned it earlier, but it was such an emotional blow that I couldn't see the issue with any clarity or rationality. For any of you suffering from withdrawal (and you almost have to be), here's a compilation of novela smooches from Youtube. 

It seems like two competing and contradictory narratives are developing about the flu, both of which would make the Mexican government look bad. The first is that the Mexican government didn't act quickly enough, and allowed other countries to be caught unawares. That may be the case, but the conflicting information that is still swirling about the origins of the virus (see he WSJ story linked above) would seem to indicate that there was genuine uncertainty, rather than any Mexican scheme to hide the severity of what they had on their hands. The second criticism posits that the flu wasn't that big of a deal, and it was blown out of proportion. This, which in its extremist iteration takes the form of Mexico's government creating the virus in order to distract the public from a glut of bad news, would seem to be contradicted by the experts at the WHO raising the pandemic threat and all the rest. Furthermore, lots of governments were taking this very seriously; it wasn't like the Mexican government was fear-mongering while everyone else was arguing for calm. I suspect that, while much information about missteps will emerge in the coming months, and we will likely learn that isolated elements of the Mexican response smacked of both covering up and stoking fear, the overall government response was walked a pretty fine line between those two extremes.