This paper contributes to the debate on the Caring city by analyzing how the local and national states managed the pandemic in Mexico City and the lived and material effects on women. Based on a series of participatory mapping workshops carried out with two groups of women: those who worked from home during the lockdown in 2020–2021 and those forced to seek work outside the home, as well as interviews with civil servants, the paper shows how the so-called 'caring' state misunderstood the material and embodied conditions of social inequalities. While the state narrative of care and protection was premised on the isolation of a 'healthy inside' from a 'contagious outside', women's experience of COVID measures would be better described as a series of thresholds assembling a body-domestic-city experience. The paper concludes that it is necessary to adjust our geographical lenses and consider the domestic space as more than unit of resolution (grain), giving it instead the necessary attention to understand its relation with urban space.