Your conclusion is not: The traveler must have been "illegal". In fact, you're almost certainly wrong. Furthermore, all travelers are not checked just for immigration status (you DO realize that tourism is a thing that is allowed, right?), but they were also checked (albeit poorly) for signs of infection in the travel phase. It's just not good enough. Many articles were pointing out how they weren't even using the temperature guns correctly, and infected people can be contagious for weeks before the signs even begin to show. Screening techniques, even if used perfectly, are inadequate.
You'll never eat your words for what you're wrong about: the connection between illegal immigration and Covid-19, because you will convince yourself that your views are correct despite the fact that virtually no cases of this will ever have anything to do with illegal immigration.
That’s not even obviously true. They could have gotten it from someone else who, in turn, got it from someone who traveled.
Facts be facts, irrational xenophobia.
Mexico is just the final stop for smuggling from about 50 different countries, including quite a few from Africa and the middle east.
Edit: people silently downvoting don't seem to understand the low likelihood of a a highly contagious, asymptomatic virus being detected before a major outbreak, and the sorry state of medical infrastructure in most of Mexico. Look at how quickly it spread after detection in Italy, Iran, and South Korea, nations with first world medical care. There's a good chance it's already spreading in the U.S. - some 7000 people in California being monitored, about 1000 in WA, 80 in Long Island, NY - there's no way we've caught all of the local outbreaks. Not to mention the tests have an absurdly high false positive rate.
Btw, Mexico has public/free hospitals unlike the USA. You can bet that flu-like symptoms and higher IMSS volume shows up in Mexican media just like backed up hospitals always get national attention.
Not sure why you think USA is going to have such a better response to this either. In Mexico, people can at least go to the hospital to get checked, even private hospitals are cheap. In USA, people will just gamble to save the $100 checkup and go to work. I know I would.
Really? You can't see why the US might have a better response than Mexico?
that assumes that something that you refer to as "third world" has a large enough international (asian for the most part) traveling populace to bring the disease back before countries that have a much higher GDP and thus much higher number of traveling citizens.
what you're saying simply doesn't add up.
But do I have to assume that illegal immigrants are spreading the virus in the US?
So by know it's quite possible for people to become infected through people of more out less any (widespread) nationality/ethnicity etc.
Also it seems that most European who carried the virus to a new EU country where people traveling legally (business or holiday) _to a region believed to be not a risico region when they went there_.
While illegal immigration can complicate things I believe it's very unlikely to become the main source. It's much more likely to come through legal travels, e.g. tourists.
One problem I see which the US _might_ get is that due to their health system infected people, especially if the syntoms are not to bad, might be less willing to go to the hospital (for monetary reasons). I hope for the US that the state will cover that expenses independent of insurance status or something like that. It would be quite ironic if the US ends to with a uncontrolled outbreak due to monitor reasons...
Or a tourist visited China or S. Korea and came home. Or maybe they were a business traveller. Or maybe someone who just flew on a plane with someone who had been to such areas. Or...
So does, you know, normal travel
I predicted this already in one of my comments. It's only a matter of time before migrants spread the virus and regardless of your position on [illegal|legal] immigration, this will turn sentiment against porous borders. Just one of the many ways this virus is poised to alter the global geopolitical landscape.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_by_country
However, the 2009 swine flu wasn't particularly deadly. CDC estimates about 0.001 % of the world's population dying as a result of respiratory complications: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi.... The US, according to Wikipedia, had 12000 deaths.
The coronavirus is going to be orders of magnitude worse, and the current informal arrangements in the US will be overwhelmed.
Are you suggesting that more deadly diseases are more likely to spread among the population per capita? I had thought we were discussing whether the lack of mandated sick days enabled higher spread of infectious diseases.
If you take Italy as example rather than China, there are 400+ cases reported, likely more existing unreported, but only 12 deaths. That's a .03% rate conservatively which is about the same as the flu (.05%), if we assume (darkly) that a few more people will die.
A lot of places of employment have sick leave. Years ago I worked at a rural supermarket that gave sick leave.
> and the fact that most everyone works at-will.
And, an employer that fires people who get sick soon finds no one wants to work for them.
I mean that's how viruses are transmitted.