Two-year follow-up of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico

Front Public Health. 2023 Jan 13:10:1050673. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.1050673. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Background: After the initial outbreak in China (December 2019), the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11th, 2020. This paper aims to describe the first 2 years of the pandemic in Mexico.

Design and methods: This is a population-based longitudinal study. We analyzed data from the national COVID-19 registry to describe the evolution of the pandemic in terms of the number of confirmed cases, hospitalizations, deaths and reported symptoms in relation to health policies and circulating variants. We also carried out logistic regression to investigate the major risk factors for disease severity.

Results: From March 2020 to March 2022, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Mexico underwent four epidemic waves. Out of 5,702,143 confirmed cases, 680,063 were hospitalized (11.9%), and 324,436 (5.7%) died. Even if there was no difference in susceptibility by gender, males had a higher risk of death (CFP: 7.3 vs. 4.2%) and hospital admission risk (HP: 14.4 vs. 9.5%). Severity increased with age. With respect to younger ages (0-17 years), the 60+ years or older group reached adjusted odds ratios of 9.63 in the case of admission and 53.05 (95% CI: 27.94-118.62) in the case of death. The presence of any comorbidity more than doubled the odds ratio, with hypertension-diabetes as the riskiest combination. While the wave peaks increased over time, the odds ratios for developing severe disease (waves 2, 3, and 4 to wave 1) decreased to 0.15 (95% CI: 0.12-0.18) in the fourth wave.

Conclusion: The health policy promoted by the Mexican government decreased hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among older adults with the highest risk of admission and death. Comorbidities augment the risk of developing severe illness, which is shown to rise by double in the Mexican population, particularly for those reported with hypertension-diabetes. Factors such as the decrease in the severity of the SARS-CoV2 variants, changes in symptomatology, and advances in the management of patients, vaccination, and treatments influenced the decrease in mortality and hospitalizations.

Keywords: COVID-19; case-fatality-proportion; comorbidities; logistic-regression; symptoms; variants.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Aged
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Diabetes Mellitus* / epidemiology
  • Follow-Up Studies
  • Humans
  • Hypertension* / epidemiology
  • Infant
  • Infant, Newborn
  • Longitudinal Studies
  • Male
  • Mexico / epidemiology
  • Pandemics
  • RNA, Viral
  • SARS-CoV-2

Substances

  • RNA, Viral

Supplementary concepts

  • SARS-CoV-2 variants

Grants and funding

This research was partially funded by PAPIIT-DGAPA IN202821, awarded to RG-R and by grant “ANRS-Emerging Infectious Diseases. Project ECTZ184596: Combining mathematical modeling and phylodynamics analyses to characterize interactions between SARS-CoV-2 lineages within the increasingly vaccinated population of Mexico City awarded to CA. This is a contribution of the CoViGen-Mex [Consorcio Mexicano de Vigilancia Genómica, 2022].