Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced on Sunday on Twitter that he had tested positive for the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Obrador added that his symptoms were light and that he was receiving medical treatment.
“As always, I am optimistic,” Lopez Obrador, 67, said in a tweet.
The disclosure has set alarm bells ringing in the country as the 67-year-old was a heavy smoker until he suffered a serious heart attack in 2013.
Reports said Obrador’s history of heart problems and high blood pressure may complicate doctors’ efforts to combat the COVID-19 infection.
“Health professionals are monitoring continuously in case there is a sign of alarm that could lead to hospitalization,” health official Jose Luis Alomia Zegarra told a regular evening news conference.
Anybody with Lopez Obrador’s health profile would be closely watched, including “regular monitoring of the vital signs, of oxygenation,” Alomia added, in response to questions about the president’s past heart problems and high blood pressure.
Although Lopez Obrador has vowed to keep working, he said for now he would step back from the 7 a.m. daily news conferences that have permeated the fabric of Mexican political life since he took office in December 2018.
Instead, his Interior Minister Olga Sanchez must take the reins at what are likely to be subdued events by comparison to Lopez Obrador’s fiery lectures on where Mexico went wrong under previous administrations.
Mexico is in the grip of a second wave of the pandemic, with the country’s official death toll from COVID-19 set to pass a grim milestone of 150,000 in coming days.
