Zuckermann Critical

Leo Zuckermann (of course not an epidemiologist but a fair-minded, well informed analyst) has the following take on the official response to the flu: 

I wonder: at this stage, can we really make a judgment about the performance of the government?

I think not, because we still have not seen the final result of this epidemic. Neither from a health nor an economic point of view. Although the priority in this crisis is preserving life, we also have to take into account that there will be important economic consequences. The government probably contained the epidemic but its performance, because of the lack of an effective system of epidemiological statistics, was exaggerated, which deepened one of the worst economic recessions in modern history.

[Break]

The question is inevitable: quo is responsible for the failure of the system [of early warning against diseases]? Who's going to pay for the broken plates? Because there will be many consequences of this error not only in human lives but in the extremely high human costs. The federal secretary of health says that the blame is on the federated entities: "The state health services' reports about suspected flu cases and the grave picture of pneumonia have been irregular, which explains the inconsistency of the information that we have witnessed in recent days". But the federal government can't shield itself behind the same answer that it uses in the war against organized crime: "The states don't cooperate." It can't be. They must say which states haven't cooperated and why there wasn't a mechanism to punish those entities that didn't turn in information on the epidemic that they were obligated to hand over. They must say who was the party in the federal government responsible for collecting the information with the precision that the issue merits. They must say why Mexico didn't have the assigned clinical laboratories to test with certainty for cases of influenza.

At this stage I wouldn't venture to make a judgment about whether the governments in Mexico have performed well or badly in this epidemiological crisis. What I will venture to affirm is that they failed to detect it on time and measure in its correct proportion.