Dr. Julio Frenk Mora said that one way to prevent this from happening would be mass testing. In order for people to leave their homes and resume regular operations, testing with contact tracing provided the essential security and protocols for better security.

He said that closing the businesses for weeks would all have been for nothing if they reopened too soon, which would result in "losing control" of the coronavirus once more.

Mexico's the only country that's not doing it

In a flurry of criticisms, Dr. Julio Frenk Mora believed that the federal government would be guaranteeing Mexico's early closure as soon as they reopened. He said in a report, "It's irresponsible to say that the economy can be opened without testing."

Data by the Health Ministry showed that 1,600 tests were done for every million Mexicans, and this was consistent with the figures provided by global statistics website worldometer. Despite that the pandemic was showing no signs of slowing down and more so stopping, the López Obrador administration still decided to push through plans to reopen this June.

In fact, work deemed essential like mining, construction, and production of automotive parts already resumed as early as mid-May.

Dr. Julio Frenk Mora thought that the nueva normalidad was not running smoothly and advised against it. He acknowledged that while some parts of the country were at much lower risk than others, it was not worth endangering the high-risk areas.

"In general, [Mexico] is definitely not [ready to reopen]," he said. He added that even with low-risk areas, testing was still essential to be able to ensure safety.

As the president of the University of Miami and public health academic, Dr. Julio Frenk Mora said that the administration's unwillingness for mass testing was "inexplicable". He believed that if the authorities did not know the true magnitude of the pandemic, a solution would be further out of reach.

"Mexico is the only country that's not doing it," he said, referring to mass testing. Other countries have opted to do mass testing to control the pandemic.

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Early window of opportunity lost

Current Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell Ramirez repeatedly said in interviews that mass testing would be for naught since most of the results would come back negative anyway. He did say that the government would be planning to do more tests, just not in the scale that mass testing would be.

López-Gatell and other health officials called the idea of mass testing an "inefficient assessment strategy" that would only deplete resources.

He insisted that cases were going down especially in the capital, which he believed was representative of the rest of Mexico. And even then, there lacked follow up visits to hospitals.

Dr. Julio Frenk Mora said that it would be a mistake for the federal government to imply that Mexico had already seen the worst of the pandemic, even suggesting that the peak is still yet to come.

When the administration downplayed the seriousness of mitigation measures against the coronavirus on the period of the outbreak, an early window of opportunity to prevent further spread was lost.

Countries like Vietnam, South Korea, and Switzerland successfully implemented mass testing and other measures to ensure public safety at an earlier date. Frenk added that populist governments like that of Mexico tended to undervalue the opinion of health experts, and so the coronavirus became more difficult to control.

He rejected the president's announcement last month declaring the virus had been contained when the government had done minimal effort to control it in the first place. Frenk said that to call reopening the economy as a 'success' would be premature.