This is a republication of a Medium article that was removed and is only available via archive sites.

The author, John Pospichal, was the first writer I’m aware of to produce a full piece observing the co-incidence of country-level excess deaths in certain places and declarations made or measures taken in the name of COVID. His article “Questions for Lockdown Apologists” (23 May 2020) is still posted and can be found here: https://medium.com/@JohnPospichal/questions-for-lockdown-apologists-32a9bbf2e247

I recently discovered Pospichal wrote a follow-up: “Questions for Lockdown Apologists: Why was the virus late to Mexico?” (24 August 2020)

It was removed from Medium but is archived here and reproduced below.

My efforts to locate Mr. Pospichal or find his contact information have been unsuccessful, so I have been unable to obtain explicit permission to republish this piece. I am doing so to bring it to the attention of others studying the COVID event.

Questions for Lockdown Apologists: Why was the virus late to Mexico?

By John Pospichal

“….And when we act, we create our own reality.” — Senior U.S. Government Official, 2004

We now have overall mortality data for the early months of 2020 for Mexico City, and it raises a few questions that cry out for explanation from lockdown apologists.

But first let’s take a look at the data.

As you can see, there was no significant increase in overall mortality in Mexico City until the week ending on April 19, and then a sudden, sharp rise during the week ending on April 26, which continued on into May.

But that is an entire month after similar surges in overall deaths occurred in most other countries we have good data for. In the countries I examined in the first part of this series, for example, the sharp rise in deaths typically began in the fourth week of March, right after the start of the lockdowns in those countries. This holds true even for nations in South America such as Ecuador, which I also examined in that post. But in Mexico City, a major international hub with a population larger than that of New York City, the sharp rise did not begin until the fourth week of April. Why?

Mexico’s “lax” response to the Coronavirus pandemic

The government of Mexico was subject to intense criticism at the start of the pandemic for its failure to implement extensive testing and restrictive lockdowns in step with rest of the Western world.

According to the Associated Press, by the end of March Mexico had performed only around 10,000 tests, whereas New York state alone had performed over 205,000. This certainly has something to do with Mexico’s low case count at the end of March compared to New York’s: 1,215 and 83,712, respectively.

In addition, lockdown measures in Mexico were slow to arrive, spread out over many weeks, and only lightly enforced at first if enforced at all. On March 12, Bloomberg reported that Mexican airports were not widely screening travelers from countries with high numbers of cases. In late March, the New York Times published a video showing Mexicans and foreign tourists crowding the streets of Mexico City without wearing masks or social distancing. “There is an unsettling sense of normalcy” here, intones the narrator.

But it appears a “sense of normalcy” was not then misplaced. Even as deaths mounted in New York City and other Western cities, all was, indeed, copacetic in Mexico City, as its case numbers and overall mortality numbers for that period show.

Until the week ending on April 26.

In the spirit of my last article, let’s add the lockdown dates to the overall mortality chart and see if any of the lockdown measures correspond to the rise in deaths.

As you can see, there was no sharp rise in deaths in Mexico City until immediately after the culmination of the lockdown in the form of the “Phase 3” measures.

This is very strange. In New York City, the spike in deaths began around March 22. The same holds true for the capital province of Ecuador, and many other Western countries. All of these increases in overall mortality directly followed the imposition of lockdowns in those nations, as I showed in my previous article.

All of which leads to the following questions:

Q: Why was Mexico, a country fiercely criticized for its “lackadaisical” response to the Coronavirus, nevertheless spared a significant rise in overall deaths in its capital city until the fourth week of April, while countries to its north and south, which by all accounts were more responsive to the threat of the virus, were afflicted with huge surges in mortality simultaneously in March?

Q: Why did this sharp increase in overall deaths begin immediately after the introduction of the “Phase 3” lockdown measures, which included the conversion of many hospital facilities into dedicated COVID-19 treatment centers, a massive increase in screenings for COVID-19 symptoms around the city, and the adoption of emergency triage protocols under the official belief that the virus was spreading uncontrollably?

Q: Why, indeed, was the virus so late to hit Mexico, and why did it wait until precisely the moment that Mexico was fully (and finally) prepared for it to start killing at levels that greatly exceeded normal deaths in that city?