Mexico (AFP)

Dr. Daniela Chavez got on the bike after a taxi driver refused to transport her. His bicycle was donated to him by members of associations which are trying to protect Mexico City health professionals on the front line in the fight against the coronavirus.

Dressed in her blouse, Daniela Chavez, who works in a public hospital in the capital, had just gotten into a taxi when the driver asked her if she was a doctor and where she worked.

Fearing to be attacked, as had already been the case for colleagues, she preferred to get out of the vehicle. In Mexico, healthcare workers used to go out on the street in their work clothes until the pandemic arrived.

"I don't know if it's psychosis ....! As health professionals, we know that we are a population at risk. We always have been. But today we are stigmatized because that exercising a noble profession is unprecedented ", notes this young doctor of 26 years.

As the epidemic spread in Mexico, rejections, even physical assaults, against doctors and nurses have multiplied, a part of the population considering them as factors of contagion.

To help them, two associations of cyclists - "Bicitekas" and "Alcadia de la Bicicleta" - launched in April an operation on social networks, calling for donations of bicycles or spare parts to offer an alternative transport to nursing staff.

- Fallen from the sky -

In a workshop in the La Escandon district, in the center of Mexico, members of Bicitekas work around twenty hours a week to repair or give a facelift to the little queens that have been given to them.

The objective is also to reduce the risk of contagion for doctors and nurses who are not thus forced to take public transport in this megalopolis of 20 million inhabitants where, in normal times, 15.6 million people move daily.

"At the start of the health emergency, we wondered what we could do to support health workers who were discriminated against, and sometimes unfortunately attacked, during their daily journeys because of their profession," said Agustin Martinez, founder of Bicitekas.

The association received some 240 requests. For the time being, around fifty "recyclettes", as they have been baptized, have been offered.

For Diana Garduño, a 30-year-old nurse, it was a gift dropped from the sky, when her bike was recently stolen from her during a burglary.

She admits that she was very afraid when one of her colleagues who was walking on the street was sprayed with a hot drink.

"It is depressing to see that once we are outside we experience these kinds of assaults while we do our best to keep the patients well," she said.

"If people were better informed, there would not be this type of action against health personnel," said Diego Villafuerte, 23, a medical intern in a private hospital, who also received a bicycle.

Mexico, which has 127 million inhabitants, began Monday the first phase of deconfinement, after two months of restrictions due to the pandemic which has affected more than 97,000 people and left more than 10,600 dead.

In a capital where barely 340,000 people use a bicycle to get around, the Secretariat for Mobility has announced the opening of 54 km of cycle paths on major axes to reduce the spread of Covid-19.

They will be added to the already existing 88 km, with the objective of reaching 600 km in 2024.

© 2020 AFP