Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim tests positive for Covid-19

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MEXICO CITY (January 26, 2021) – Mexican businessman Carlos Slim has tested positive for covid-19. Mexico’s richest man had preventively gone to the National Institute of Nutrition for clinical analysis, monitoring, and treatment. After a week with minor symptoms, his son Carlos Slim Domit informed yesterday that his father is evolving favorably via Twitter.

The tycoon, has contributed through the Carlos Slim Foundation to expand the hospital capacity in Mexico City and distribute the vaccine in the country, is considered, at 80 years old, a high-risk person for contracting the disease.

According to Forbes, Slim’s net worth is valued at $60 billion thanks to his telecommunications businesses in Mexico. The owner of Telmex, Telcel, Claro, and América Móvil has contributed to the coronavirus health crisis in Mexico with the expansion of hospital beds in the Citibanamex center, reconverted into a hospital to treat covid-19, and with the distribution of the vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Slim is one of the 10,872 cases of coronavirus registered on the last day in Mexico, a country that accumulates almost 170,000 deaths.

The businessman’s positive result is the second case of coronavirus in public figures to hit Mexico 24 hours. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced this Sunday via Twitter that he had been infected and left the Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, as a replacement. “The symptoms are mild, but I am already in medical treatment. As always, I am optimistic. We will all get through this,” wrote the 63-year-old president, who has repeatedly refused to wear a mask at public events during the pandemic.

Last October, when the second wave had not yet catastrophically hit the country, Slim warned that the pandemic’s blow requires new and adventurous plans to fight unemployment and save companies from bankruptcy. This “invisible virus has generated an unusual economic and social situation that will lead to a new normality, although many things will no longer be the same,” he said during his virtual participation in a meeting of the Spanish Confederation of Directors and Executives (CEDE).

The Slim family had already lived the disease closely at the beginning of the pandemic when a ski trip in Colorado ended up initiating an outbreak in the Mexican elite. Among the affected passengers was businessman José Kuri, cousin of Carlos Slim and board member of Banco Inbursa, who landed in Toluca with Jaime Ruiz Sacristán, president of the Mexican Stock Exchange. Sacristán died a month later of the disease.