Every country has its own way of responding to the coronavirus.

If you want to see how the minimalist approach works keep an eye on Mexico.

The country hasn’t shut borders, airports or restaurants, or introduced any serious containment policies. Street markets remain open and life goes on.

The country’s president, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is still out there hugging people and shaking hands and kissing babies.

He carries lucky charms, including Catholic scapulars and a US two-dollar bill, which he calls “my bodyguards.”

It’s the Mexican way and defended by the bureaucrat in charge of the country’s coronavirus response, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who has told reporters, “The force of the president is moral, it’s not a force of contagion.”

The critics are, naturally enough, calling it a high-risk, almost criminal, strategy, but there is more to this than willful ignorance or superstition.

Mexico has been through all this before. It knows how much it costs to put the health of your people ahead of the health of your economy.

In 2009, when a new form of swine flu erupted in Northern Mexico, prompting fears of a global pandemic, the Mexican government responded, with a national shutdown of public life,  along the lines of many other countries at the moment.

It was a success. The disease was quickly contained and life soon returned to normal. Mexico was praised for its quick and decisive action.

But the economic impact was significant, shaving, by some estimates, a full percentage point from an economy already reeling from the global financial crisis. Mexico’s economy shrank by more than five per cent in a year.

“The economic loss was directly related, in the most past, to the disruption of tourism, trade and services,” says Lopez Obrador’s chief defender,  Lopez-Gatell, who was also a senior official in the epidemiology department during the 2009 flu crisis.

That is why, he has told reporters, “it is so important, with very careful precision, not to take pre-emptive actions that do not correspond to the magnitude of the risk.”

Lopez-Gatell believes countries around the world are repeating Mexico’s mistake in 2009, making decisions based on anxiety and social pressure rather than science.

Lopez Obrador acknowledges the “pressure of all types” to respond more aggressively to the coronavirus outbreak but says his government won’t bow to them.

“Close the airport, shut down everything, paralyse the economy. No,” he has told reporters at his regular news conference.

“Of course we’re worried about the situation of the epidemic, and we have to attend to it, but we also have to act responsibly.”

The big problem for AMLO is that the Mexican economy is wobbling once again. Mexico last year suffered its first recession in a decade, the price of oil, a key export, has collapsed and the peso is at record lows against the US dollar.

Some forecasters predict the Mexican economy will shrink by 4 per cent this year, even before a coronavirus virus response is factored in.

As Reuters says, “The gamble is straightforward: Mexico’s economy was stagnating even before the COVID-19 outbreak shuttered factories worldwide and the government has said it wants to limit economic damage by not over-reacting.”

And so, it boils down to a harsh and cruel choice: which do you try to protect first, the physical well-being of your people, or their economic well-being?

An option made all the more difficult by Mexico’s limited capacity to provide comprehensive health care or economic support across the country where around a-third of the population lives in often-isolated poverty.

One positive is that Mexico has a relatively young population, meaning that there is a smaller pool of people aged over 65 who are more likely to suffer coronavirus complications.

Only 7 per cent Mexico’s population is aged over 65, compared to almost 16 per cent in the United States, 15 per cent in Australia and 23 per cent in Italy.