Reuters

AFTER almost a fortnight of high alert and a five-day shutdown of ghostly calm, Mexico City this week began gingerly to return to its normal metropolitan bustle. Fears that swine flu might be a deadly epidemic have subsided: testing has shown that it was responsible for fewer than 50 of the 159 deaths that it was reported to have caused in Mexico. So far it seems to be barely more contagious than normal influenza, and is treatable with antiviral drugs. On May 6th Mexico City's municipal government lifted a weeklong ban on restaurants seating customers. The national government allowed universities, high schools, churches and museums to reopen from the following day, while primary schools will do so on May 11th. Mexicans are dispensing with their face masks, and breathing a sigh of relief.

As they do so an inquest is starting into the authorities' handling of what has turned out thus far to be a fairly mild bug. To some, the official reaction was both tardy and excessive. The first patient known to have had swine flu, Édgar Hernández, a small boy in a village in the eastern state of Veracruz, saw a doctor on April 2nd. The first confirmed death—Adela María Gutiérrez, a 39-year-old woman in the southern state of Oaxaca—occurred on April 13th. But the authorities did not send samples abroad for genomic analysis, the process that eventually identified the new virus, until April 22nd. They did not acquire the technology to test for themselves for another week. “They should have analysed the samples immediately,” says Laura Moreno Altamirano, a professor of public health at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Then they would have known that the virus wasn't so aggressive, and they wouldn't have had to implement all these measures.”

Those measures included closing schools, football stadiums, gyms, cinemas, bars and nightclubs; cancelling concerts, plays, festivals and church services; limiting restaurant services to takeaway and delivery; and augmenting a public holiday by a day to create the five-day shutdown.

This shutdown hit the economy hard. Because of its close links with America's economy, and especially its crippled car industry, Mexico had already slid into a deep and worsening recession. In February output shrank by 10.8% compared with the same month last year, the worst number since these figures began to be collected in 1993. Agustín Carstens, the finance minister, said that the swine-flu outbreak will lop an extra 0.3% from GDP this year. Some private estimates are much higher.

The government has announced $1.3 billion in tax breaks and spending to help offset these losses, which will be financed with borrowing. But the damage to Mexico's image abroad, and therefore to its tourism industry and food exports, may be long-lasting. Hotel occupancy has fallen to single digits. Several airlines have stopped flying to the country. Eight countries, including China and Russia, have banned some Mexican farm products. (China this week allowed a plane chartered by the Mexican government to pick up 71 Mexican citizens whom it had quarantined, although they had no flu symptoms.)

The episode has also exposed inequalities in Mexico's health services. Many patients, particularly those in poor rural areas, receive dubious care or no care at all. Poorer people often prefer to buy drugs at a pharmacy instead of losing a day's work dealing with the public-health bureaucracy, says Verónica Baz of CIDAC, a think-tank in Mexico City.

Local media reported several cases of ambulance drivers refusing to transport patients, and of hospitals lacking antiviral drugs. Rogelio Pérez Padilla, the director of the National Institute for Respiratory Diseases, admits there were “time lapses in distribution” from the government's strategic reserve of 1.8m doses. But in a big developing country of 110m people, “some delays were to be expected,” he said.

The critics, of course, enjoy perfect hindsight. Miguel Ángel Lezana, the government's chief epidemiologist, notes that between 1,500 and 1,800 Mexicans typically die of flu each year during March and April. There was no reason to suspect a new virus, he says, until a spike in cases among the young and healthy appeared towards the end of the flu season in early April. The subsequent fall in the number of cases is because of the government's decisive action to impede the spread of the infection, according to José Ángel Córdova, the health minister.

Public opinion seems to agree. Polls show that around 70% of respondents approve of President Felipe Calderón's handling of the swine-flu outbreak and of his overall performance. His government will soon be held to account, in a mid-term Congressional election on July 5th. The sickly economy, and doubts about whether Mr Calderón is winning a battle to tame violent drug-trafficking gangs, have given the opposition plenty of ammunition.

But the polls show his conservative National Action Party starting to cut what was a double-digit lead for the formerly ruling, centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party to around five points. It is a Mexican instinct to rally round the leader at a time of trial. As normality returns, Mr Calderón will have to persuade his people that his government's actions saved lives.