In Mexico, as COVID-19 cases mount, vaccine rollout stalls and despair grows

The vaccine pipeline is clogged, hospitals are overflowing, oxygen tanks for the ill are scarce — and the toll of dead and infected keeps spiking.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers and others have taken to the streets protesting shutdowns as Mexico's coronavirus-ravaged economy continues to crater absent any significant stimulus package from the government.

"It feels like a horror film that never ends," said Evelyn Beltrán, 39, a nurse in the city of Puebla. "What an awful sense of hopelessness and desperation."

That's the bleak pandemic panorama facing Mexico almost one year after the first infected person was diagnosed here. At the time, officials vowed that the country was prepared for the worst, despite its tattered health care infrastructure and high proportion of vulnerable citizens with diabetes, obesity, hypertension and other ailments.

Following traditional holiday family