Some politicians in cities near the U.S. border with Mexico have raised concerns with the influx of migrants and the lack of COVID-19 testing for new arrivals.
Douglas J. Nicholls, the mayor of Yuma, AZ, told The New York Times that before a city medical center took over testing these individuals for the virus, they would be dropped off on the side of a road without having been tested.
“It’s completely crazy,” he said. “It’s not the way we should be handling things during a pandemic.”
Ken Paxton, the attorney general for the state of Texas, filed a lawsuit that claimed the federal government was “encouraging the spread of COVID-19 at the border,” The Times reported.
The paper said that Washington insists there simply is not the infrastructure in place to absorb so many people and test them.
John Modlin, the interim Border Patrol chief for the Tucson sector, told the paper it takes up to three hours to process a migrant, and COVID-19 testing would take another 20 minutes. He said that number would need to be multiplied by a thousand people.
“The Border Patrol does not want to get in the business of testing or inoculating people,” Modlin said.
TREND FORECAST: As we have reported, in our 19 January article, “LATIN AMERICA FACES SLOW, PAINFUL ECONOMIC RECOVERY,” most of the continent has been devastated by the COVID War, and it will take at least until 2023 to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to the World Bank.
We also noted the region was the world’s slowest-growing before the COVID War was launched. At the end of this year, the region’s economic production will still be 4.8 percent less than in 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund’s forecast.
Thus, as with Africa and hard-hit Asian nations, hundreds of millions of people will do all they can to escape poverty, violence, crime, and government corruption. In turn, there will be strong anti-immigration/populist movements among the countries they are trying to escape into.
