Analizando el Indicador Estatal Covid de Aguascalientes: ¿Realmente es útil?
LJA.mx — Opinión
Analyzing the State COVID Indicator of Aguascalientes: Is it really useful?
José María Velasco — El Citlaltépetl visto desde Maltrata (1883) Museo Nacional de Arte · Mexico City A steam train winds through the Mexican highlands toward Pico de Orizaba — modernity moving across geography it does not yet fully understand. The same tension between data, territory, and what indicators can and cannot see.
Aguascalientes’ state COVID indicator tracks pandemic risk at the municipal level using just four indices — compared to the federal system’s ten — and publishes no replicable methodology for two of them. The op-ed argues that an indicator this thin produces the same classifications as the federal benchmark while lacking analytical transparency, substituting political surface area for the granular, hospital-level data that local health decisions actually require.
The Backdrop
In December 2020, the state of Aguascalientes launched its own pandemic risk dashboard — the Indicador Estatal Covid (IEC) — to run in parallel with Mexico’s federal epidemic traffic light. The state’s stated rationale was reasonable: federal indicators painted with a broad brush, and Aguascalientes wanted a tool that could pinpoint risk at the municipal level so that mobility restrictions and business closures could be applied surgically rather than blanket-imposed across the entire state.
The intent was sound. The execution was the question.
What the IEC Actually Measures
The IEC computes municipal risk as a sum of four indices:
- Positivity rate of tests
- Active cases index
- Trend index
- Mortality index
The federal traffic light, by contrast, uses ten indicators spanning hospital occupancy, incidence, ICU and ventilator availability, estimated case trends, and mortality rates. Two issues stand out from the IEC’s design:
- Replicability. The state never published the formulas. The “trend” and “mortality” indices are described in conceptual terms only — there is no public methodology that would allow an independent analyst to reproduce the index from raw data.
- Resolution. With only four indices, most municipalities cluster at the same grade (3, with some pressure toward 4) — essentially mirroring the federal classification rather than offering finer-grained signal.
If a municipal indicator produces the same answer as the federal one, but with less data and no published methodology, it is hard to argue it adds analytical value. It only adds political surface area.
What Would Make It Better
The op-ed proposes three concrete improvements that would move the IEC from a parallel headline number toward a genuine local-decision tool:
- Add testing volume. Publish the number of tests performed per week per municipality. Without this, positivity is uninterpretable.
- Publish per-hospital capacity. Report ward-bed and ICU-bed availability for each hospital in the state, not a state-level aggregate. Capacity decisions are made hospital-by-hospital; the data should match.
- Borrow the CDMX QR-code system. Mexico City’s establishment-level QR check-in system for contact tracing is exactly the sort of micro-data that distinguishes a real risk indicator from a recoded version of national signals.
The Stakes
Aguascalientes had become a national news story for the wrong reason in late 2020 — a sharp surge in confirmed cases and deaths. This was not a surprise to modelers. Valeria Gracia and Fernando Alarid-Escudero of PADeCI had used the SC-COSMO epidemiological model to project several scenarios for the state, and the projections were not encouraging.
What those scenarios shared was a single dependency: outcomes were going to be driven by state public-health policy and citizen behavior, not by the existence of a dashboard. A state-level traffic light cannot, on its own, change the trajectory of a pandemic. It can guide the policies that do — but only if the dashboard is robust enough, transparent enough, and granular enough to drive real decisions.
The IEC has noble intent: contain infection where needed without indiscriminately freezing economic activity. But intent is not enough. A risk indicator that uses fewer variables than the federal benchmark, publishes no replicable methodology, and produces nearly identical classifications is not a tool — it is a label. Pandemic decisions must be anchored in evidence: in transparent data, in published methods, and in models like SC-COSMO that quantify the consequences of different policy paths. Anything less substitutes branding for governance, in a moment when the cost of doing so is measured in lives.
Citation
Roa, J. (2020, December 14). Analizando el Indicador Estatal Covid de Aguascalientes: ¿Realmente es útil? LJA.mx — Opinión.