According to the health officials, a second wave of the pandemic is imminent within the coming months. However, analysts expect that the first wave might peak as late as May because business operations are reopening.

On another note, the government claims they are keen on responding to the rising criminality rate through deployment of the military in municipalities.

Government to still conduct tests

In an interview, López-Gatell said that mass testing would be useless since most of the results would come back negative. Despite thinking it was not a priority, he said that more tests would still be done in Mexico, this time in a "carefully planned manner".

He said responding to the surge of cases in Mexico with a strategy as "inefficient" as mass testing would only be a waste of resources.

The López Obrador administration already lifted quarantine measures for low-risk municipalities this Monday. According to data by global statistics website worldometer, Mexico so far tested 1,200 people for every million in the population.

Currently, the Mexican government only conducts coronavirus tests on patients with severe health complications. Patients with mild symptoms or who could be asymptomatic would run the risk of infecting more people should they be dismissed by authorities.

López-Gatell insisted that cases were starting to go down in the metropolitan area, which he believed could represent the situation of the rest of Mexico.

The combined rejection of both the government and the health ministry to mass testing incited much criticism from the public. Lack of testing would only suggest that Mexico failed to illustrate a more accurate picture of the grim reality that the healthcare systems were facing.

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Military coordinates with the National Guard

Last week, President Andres Manual López Obrador issued a decree to allow the army to support the National Guard in the management of cartel-related crimes. This would last for five years.

Civil society and human rights organizations expressed their concern over the order. The presidential decree failed to specify how the military should be tasked with public safety duties or how they will cooperate with the National Guard. Worries were also raised about the militarization of public safety, which López Obrador denied.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, members of the National Guard have already been deployed at hospitals. Most of the violent incidents that happened near healthcare institutions were assaults against medical personnel, and so the presence of the police would be to discourage that.

Whatever the government's solution, the drug cartels have been on the move during the pandemic. After providing relief packages to vulnerable communities in the rural areas, the criminal groups have also begun imposing authority over the localities through enforcing their own curfews.

The army would join the National Guard in handling these kinds of crime. This would also mean they would become more vulnerable to corruption and infiltration by members of the cartels, which was only a part of a myriad of security problems Mexico is facing.