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Op-Ed
California Governor Newsom Blamed for Prolonging Epidemic by Deliberately Importing COVID-Positive Patients from Mexico
By John Cleer
California Hospitals near the southern border are airlifting local coronavirus patients hundreds of miles away, flying them as far North as Sacramento and San Francisco because the local Covid wards are full—largely with green-card-holding Mexican nationals and Americans who live in Mexico. For the past six weeks [i], ambulances have been picking up diseased Covid sufferers at the border and driving enough of them to our hospitals for hospital systems across Imperial County, California to reach full capacity.
On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a multitude of draconian measures to combat this, including the forced closings of businesses in seven counties which together account for 72 percent of the state population, the promise of $2.5 Billion in Covid funds to counties that cooperate with the suggestions he will make, and the release of 3,500 inmates who Newsom claims will be nonviolent, non-sex offenders. [ii]
With 3,500 prison bunks soon to be available, Newsom also announced “we will be stepping up our enforcement” [iii] of coronavirus measures, presumably focused on mask wearing, social distancing and churchgoing. “If local officials are unwilling to enforce and are being dismissive, we will condition the distribution of those dollars. Again, 2.5 billion.” [iv] And he’s “rolled back” numerous coronavirus reopening measures statewide, including Imperial County’s stay-at-home order. [v]
Where was Governor Newsom 6 weeks ago? “Mexicali has the third highest number of confirmed COVID cases in Mexico, with its main hospitals at four-fifths capacity,” Reuters news wrote in late May. “Only a few miles beyond the border fence, Imperial County, California, is coping with the most COVID hospitalizations per capita in the state – well over twice the rate of the next highest county. For the past two weeks, Imperial County’s largest hospital has used helicopters to fly patients to other clinics, including … San Diego and Palm Springs, because its intensive care unit is full.” [vi]
Was it appropriate to bring people who are collapsing from disease into our country [vii], in large enough numbers to overwhelm hospitals across entire cities and counties, in the middle of an epidemic of the very same disease? Won’t we need to use our hospitals if there’s another outbreak, as we are being told there will be, and shouldn’t we therefore leave some bed space for our residents?
Perhaps a greater concern is the potential spread vector when you transport sick people from an outbreak zone into our southern border area, load up its hospitals with foreigners and out-of-towners and introduce substantial risk of transmission into an area where beforehand there was relatively little—and then medevac the locals who come down with it into densely-populated cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento [viii]. This has obviously created a high potential for an outbreak to spread through El Centro and into Los Angeles, San Francisco and the rest of the country, particularly since the latter two cities have sprawling, unhygienic homeless encampments overlapping with high tourism areas that are frequented by travelers from every region of the country, primarily I would suspect from other large Metropolitan areas.
As the Washington Post [ix] and New York Times [x] have noted enthusiastically in similarly-titled articles, many of the people being infected in Mexico are American citizens, and many other Americans in border towns come into contact with Covid-positive Mexican residents on both sides of the border. So our country bears responsibility for the health of these citizens and cannot suddenly close its doors to them. But what of its responsibility to them leading up to this resurgence?
The National Governors’ Association states plainly: “As chief executive, governors are responsible for ensuring their state is adequately prepared for emergencies and disasters of all types and sizes… States focus on four stages of disaster or emergency management: Prepare; Prevent; Respond; Recover.” [xi] It is unclear what, if anything, Governor Newsom has done to prepare for or prevent the spread of this new outbreak, and it has taken him six weeks to respond.
What is clear is that preparation and prevention starts at the border, not inside of it after transferring the infected persons in. Preparation would have to involve taking measures ahead of time to facilitate and expedite the potential enactment of serious border restrictions, and announcements to citizens home and abroad of the risks incurred by traveling into less developed countries during disease outbreaks—followed by warnings that the governor may curtail such travel. Prevention would have to mean enacting these measures.
I have lived and traveled in Mexico myself, all around the Baja including Mexicali. Their plumbing systems are near-universally unable to process toilet paper, so into the basket it goes, all across the country. At a number of hotels I’ve stayed in, there are regularly scheduled water outages and the water itself has a noxious smell, as if from recycled sewage. They do not have a standardized, strictly-coded state-of-the-art waste disposal system like we do in the United States, and this would certainly appear to elevate the risk of transmission.
Chinese state media have reported that the disease may be transmitted by air through the digestive tract [xii] such as when a patient has diarrhea, a symptom present in 10-20% patients with the related SARS virus [xiii] and in 34% of Covid patients in a Hubei, China study published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology [xiv], which found that cases involving diarrhea were more severe, more latent and more likely to be fatal.
The New York Times article briefly mentions that President Trump “closed the border to all but essential travel” [xv] in March, linking an article they wrote [xvi] which was critical of him for doing so. Shouldn’t they instead be acknowledging, as a new outbreak spreads into our country from Mexico, that President Trump was right to close the border to nonessential travel? He saved American lives by doing so and reduced the burden on our health care system—California’s would be faring even worse without these immigration restrictions—and this is not only his duty as President, but Newsom’s as Governor.
So where has Governor Newsom been all this time? He was on the radio, plotting out loud to obstruct “Trump’s” wall with zoning and environmental lawsuits [xvii] before President Trump had even taken office. On Monday, February 11th of last year, Newsom was withdrawing National Guardsmen from the border “in defiance of the Trump administration’s request for support from border states,” saying “The border ‘emergency’ is a manufactured crisis, and California will not be part of this political theater” [xviii] and calling Trump’s policies “absurd.” [xix] Four days later, when the president declared a state of emergency on the southern border, Newsom held a press conference with his Attorney General, who challenged President Trump’s authority to declare the emergency. [xx] That very same day the House Judiciary Committee announced their “immediate investigation” [xxi] into the emergency declaration and the ACLU filed suit for the declaration’s “blatant illegality.” [xxii]
To many outside observers, Governor Newsom appeared to be coordinating his conference with those of the ACLU and the House Judiciary Committee, engaged together in a government-wide conspiracy to subvert the rule of law and overturn the Constitution’s division of power in order to thwart a political opponent, and overrule the 2016 Presidential Election without a shred of credible evidence for impropriety.
Following this line of thought, as I am myself among those observers, I will posit that Governor Newsom did nothing, or perhaps less, to prepare for this outbreak and its spread into the US because he wants it to spread here, and that the California hospitals are filling up not by accident but by design. So Newsom and his comrades can blame it on Trump.
Sources
i “Saturated hospitals, airlifts as California border region virus cases surge.” Reuters, 5/29/20. archive.is/RnVPS
ii “California Coronavirus Update: Governor Gavin Newsom Indicates L.A. County Could Close Back Down Soon.” Deadline.com, 6/29/20. archive.is/3tjog
iii Ibid.
iv “Governor Newsom says state weighing enforcement measures to slow disease’s spread.” San Jose Mercury News, 6/30/20. archive.is/iaDAs
v Deadline.com, archive.is/3tjog
vi Reuters, archive.is/RnVPS
vii “Coronavirus on the border: California Hospitals Overwhelmed.” Washington Post, 5/27/20. archive.is/4jrcL
viii “Coronavirus Jumps the Border, Overwhelming Hospitals in California.” New York Times, 6/7/20: archive.is/u6AGM ; updated 6/28/20: archive.fo/K67YT
ix Washington Post, archive.is/4jrcL
x New York Times, archive.fo/K67YT
xi National Governors’ Association, nga.org/consulting-2/powers-and-authority archive.fo/Dfito
xii “Coronavirus May Transmit Along Fecal-Oral Route, Xinua Reports.” Bloomberg, 2/2/20. archive.fo/RGjmn
xiii Ibid.
xiv American Journal of Gastroenterology: https://journals.lww.com/ajg/Documents/COVID_Digestive_Symptoms_AJG_Preproof.pdf archive.fo/lgvBA
xv New York Times, archive.fo/K67YT
xvi “A Closed Border, Dashed Hopes and a Looming Disaster.” New York Times, 2/21/20. archive.fo/mDfAP
xvii “California Lt. Gov: We’ll Stop Trump’s Wall with Environmental Suits.” Breitbart, 1/11/17. archive.is/Lzltm
xviii “California governor to draw down guard troops at border.” CNBC, 2/11/19. archive.fo/G17jV
xix “Newsom pulls California National Guard troops from border, slams Trump’s absurd policies.” Sacramento Bee, 2/11/19. archive.is/jqnlm
xx twitter.com/AGBecerra/status/1096491803543400448 archive.fo/GL1OE
xxi judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judiciary.house.gov/files/documents/national%20emergency%20letter%20final_0.pdf archive.fo/Mzm5A
xxii twitter.com/ACLU/status/1096496879590883333 archive.fo/SnMJU