Coronavirus: Carlos Slim, Latin America’s richest man, tests positive

Latin America’s richest man Carlos Slim has tested positive for Covid-19.

The 80-year-old Mexican telecommunications billionaire was only showing “light symptoms” and was doing “very well”, his son wrote in a tweet.

It comes a day after Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 67, also contracted the disease.

Mexico is among the world’s worst hit nations, with more than 1.7 million confirmed cases since the pandemic began, and over 150,000 deaths.

In Monday’s tweet, Mr Slim’s son Carlos Slim Domit wrote that his father was “making very good progress with Covid-19 after more than a week of minor symptoms”.

Carlos Slim had been seen at Mexico’s National institute of Nutrition for clinical analysis, the tweet added.

The tycoon and his family, who control Mexico’s largest telecoms provider America Movil, are worth an estimated $52bn (£38bn), according to Forbes magazine’s list in 2020.

Mexico continues to experience its worst moment since the pandemic reached the country last year, the BBC’s Mexico correspondent Will Grant reports. Hospitals in the capital Mexico City are overflowing, and the infection rate shows little sign of slowing down.

President López Obrador announced that an agreement had been reached with Russia for delivery of 24 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine in the next two months – but in the short term the outlook for many Mexican families remains bleak, our correspondent says.

Source: BBC