During the past year many have been able to give each other a good amount of grace and empathy and not judge them by their race, inability to wear a mask, or whether they go to the grocery store once a week or once a month to reduce their risk. Business owners have shown concern by giving special hours for the at risk or unvaccinated to come and shop early hours. And many have been using tools like microcovid.org to gauge the risk their household should budget. However not all has been as it should be.
You would hope that the racist stereotypes that caused random assaults against Asian citizens would be a thing of the past now, but in fact a more widespread racist idea has been spreading, that is, the idea that Mexican immigrants are the ones spreading COVID-19 and variants into the US.
The Math
Many myths about coronavirus are easily dispelled by some simple math – for example,
(general deaths) / (whole population) of the USA ends up being approximately equal to
(deaths after vaccine) / (number of vaccinated),
meaning that some quick calculator work can give a fairly simple proof to anyone that there are not in fact thousands of people dying from the vaccines.
A similar quick look at the stats shows the absurdity of the idea of folks “seeding” infected immigrants across the USA. Let’s look at the cases in Mexico: >3 million, out of population of about 130 million. Let’s look at the USA: >37 million out of a population of >330 million. One doesn’t need to do long division to see that political rallies and disregard of public safety measures are probably more the cause of the trend, than intermingling of travelers to or from south America.
Such a very simplistic look at those numbers might not tell the whole story, so let’s look at what public health experts and others are saying. According to an article by The Kansas City Star:
“It’s a much more believable story to blame immigrants when we have already seen them as other than ourselves and blame them for our problems: economic, political, social, cultural, …”
Recently a sign in a store blamed Mexicans for recent spread of COVID… but recently they at least rephrased it to “Stop importing COVID through border”. However according to a local doctor the surge is related to lower vaccinations.
If you want a less partisan answer than something from a newspaper such as the above, check out the Politifact: Vast immigration spread is marked false, and see more details here.
When you hear something on a news channel it is best to actually check if there is anything true behind it… especially those commonly spread on the internet.