Officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) have repeatedly praised the Mexican government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis: “Mexico is taking several of the lessons learnt by other countries, like China, and applying measures consistent with WHO recommendations; it was the first to set in place a coronavirus detection program and that is a basic premise to reduce the speed of the pandemic.”

With cases slightly above 400, five deaths (a 1.5 percent mortality rate, well below the global average), and 10 percent of cases requiring hospitalization, the strategy laid out by deputy secretary for public health Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez seems to be working so far. Oxford University’s COVID-19 response tracker places Mexico in the same category of stringency as the United States (despite the drastic difference in the number of cases), and social distancing measures have been implemented far in advance of other countries relative to the number of cases.

You wouldn’t know this from the onslaught of attacks in the national and foreign press, painting the Mexican government as inactive and president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) as a superstitious populist who holds up images of saints to fight the virus. Almost without exception, these articles and think pieces fail to capture even the basic underlying premises of a public health plan in the works for months.