Ever since Trump tweeted that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi … wanted everyone to pack into Chinatown long after I closed the BORDER TO CHINA,” it has become a standard right wing retort whenever somebody brings up Trump’s negligence during the early days of the epidemic, that Pelosi was just as reckless when she encouraged people to patronize Chinatown businesses back when there were zero cases in Chinatown but lots of fear and prejudice. Similarly right wingers love to bring up Mayor De Blasio’s pronouncement back on Feb 13, encouraging New Yorkers to continue patronizing Flushing and Chinatown businesses, as an example of ‘see, libruls were just as reckless’. Another popular talking point is that the ‘Hug a Chinese’ day in Milan, Italy led to the coronavirus outbreak there. Implicit in all of these talking points, is the belief that Chinese immigrants are a disease vector. Fortunately today we have concrete numbers which completely explodes this myth.
The City of San Francisco did a great thing a few weeks ago- they released a map that shows the number and rate of COVID 19 infections in each of the zip codes in the city.
San Francisco Chinatown is at the upper right corner of the San Francisco Peninsula. As you can see, it has a very low incidence rate, despite having the distinction of being “the most densely populated urban area west of Manhattan”. The Richmond and Sunset districts on the west side also have large Chinese American populations, and likewise they have very low incidence rates.
NYC also has a map of incidences by zip codes. Again we see a similar situation.
The Flushing area, with incidence rates of 12-16 per 1000, while not great, is certainly doing way better than the entire Staten Island for example, which have rates of low to mid 20’s, the entire Long Island, Bronx, and lots of other neighborhoods in Queens. As for NYC Chinatown — it has an incidence rate of 11 per 1000, similar to the rest of lower Manhattan, which turned out to be doing much better than the rest of NYC. Just as in San Francisco, these Chinese neighborhoods turn out to be doing better than most other neighborhoods. The racist assumption that Chinese immigrants somehow introduced this disease to the US is bunk.
In Italy, there was indeed a Hug a Chinese day. That much was factual.
Except it wasn’t in Milan, or anywhere else in Lombardy. It was in Florence, on Feb 1. Florence is two provinces away from Lombardy. As of Feb 24, there were still ZERO cases of COVID19 in Florence. So clearly the Hug-a-Chinese Day had zilch to do with the Lombardy outbreak. I have already diaried earlier about the miracle story of the Chinese garment workers settlement in Prato , Italy, which recorded ZERO cases of COVID 19 among their 50,000 compatriots, confounding all the racists who assumed that the Italy outbreak must have originated from the Chinese garment workers.
So next time a right winger resorts to this racist scapegoating of Chinese immigrants, you can squash him with facts and numbers.