Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador continues COVID isolation

Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador continued isolating on Tuesday, two days after announcing that he tested positive for COVID-19.

He was absent from his daily news conference for the first time in his two years in office.

On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero said López Obrador was strong and involved in important matters.

"He spent an hour and a half with UNOPS on the purchase of medicines.  He was with President Putin on this call. Anyway, he has been in confinement but I think very strong and recovering very well", she said.

The president, who has rarely been seen wearing a mask, stayed out of sight as his country topped 150,000 deaths, the fourth-highest level in the world.

He has been criticised for his handling of Mexico's pandemic and for not setting an example of prevention in public.

Despite his age and high blood pressure, López Obrador has not received a vaccine, though Mexico has received batches of Pfizer-BioNTech doses.

The doubts about whether the president was vaccinated were clarified by Sánchez Cordero, who said that the president had not received the vaccine since the first to receive it will be health workers.

Under the government plan, people over 60 will start being vaccinated in February and at that time both the president and the secretary of the interior would be vaccinated.

Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell said that in order to protect the president's privacy, they will not give details of his health, but he presents a mild case of COVID with febrile fever.

Other Latin American leaders who have tested positive for the coronavirus include Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro,  Guatemala's Alejandro Giammattei, Honduras' Juan Orlando Hernández and Bolivia's then-interim President Jeanine Ánéz.