ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyze Mexico’s initial response to the COVID-19 crisis from January 2020 to June 2020. Three questions guide our analysis: (1) What signals and symbols, in terms of communication, emerged in the Mexican federal government’s strategy to respond to COVID-19? (2) What factors inhibited or enabled the transition from collective cognition to coordinated action? (3) What are some of the emerging outcomes that have characterized Mexico’s response to the COVID-19 crisis? Drawing on Comfort’s Four Cs model of crisis management (cognition, communication, coordination, and control), we identify several areas of improvement regarding various aspects of crisis management. We highlight the lack of cognition illustrated by an underestimation of the severity of the virus by the federal government, which caused a delayed response to it. Mexico’s federal strategy has included a series of contradictory messages to its population which resulted in ineffective communication; prevention and control actions among main government actors have been uncoordinated, and, as result, there has been poor containment of the virus illustrated by a catastrophic balance: approximately 240,000 deaths as of July 30, 2021. This figure is four times more than the worst scenario estimated by Undersecretary López-Gatell in June, 2020.
