Covering the H1N1 outbreak from ground zero

Rodrigo Aguiar / BNO’s Mexico bureau chief (rjavier@bnonews.com)

This started some weeks before the government sound the alarm. I saw some articles in the local papers about a new epidemic of common influenza in late April.

We knew that people were starting to die, but every year around 10,000 Mexicans die of influenza or flu related illness, so, the country was not so interested in the topic.

When the alarm was sounded, the first thing that we were thinking is something similar to the SARS in 2003 because some witnesses from hospitals were saying in the media that there was hundreds and hundreds of ill and they were dying very fast.

Another ingredient to this soup was the poor transparency from the government. The first days there was a soup of numbers of death and ill from different sources, and thats was reflected in the chaotic coverage in the media, and in BNO News.

By then, there was panic everywere after the government closed all schools across the country, limiting public gatherings and telling people to wear surgical masks and refrain from kissing and embracing.

I think at BNO the coverage was fair. When we realized that there was a little of overreaction, we decided to scale down all, and use personal twitters accounts for this info. Others were keeping the overreaction days and days, perhaps by rating reasons.

Some days passed and things changed. We were having two news conferences per day with government officials telling us about the effort to contain the virus, explaining us about how its transmitted, how we can protect ourselves.

This was a very fast situation. Started in a Friday, and the next week, there was evidence that the virus was not so lethal.

In my point of view, I think the response was appropriate. We saw in 2003 how China was covering the SARS outbreak and almost one thousand people died in Asia and America.

Some people here thinks that the government was not acting fast, but I think tracking outbreaks of new diseases is notoriously tricky.

There is heavy damage to the economy and to the country image right now. In my state, in the northwest of the country, tourism is down almost 50 percent. In other states is worst, like in Cancun.

Right now, there are 42 deaths. But because there is still testing underway from patients who died weeks ago, it will rise. We know the last dead was at least on April 30, a few days ago.

And overall, life changed. There is now an obsession with hygiene, cleaning everything, washing hands, people are carrying antibacterial gel and other things.

The economy was very bad before the outbreak, and the government just announced more measures to boost tourism but, we don’t know how much time it will take to see results. Things are almost back to normal now, but we don’t know how long it will take before we see a full economic recovery.