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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.
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