“Take, for example, the massive amount of additional debt the federal government has imposed on future generations of Americans during the COVID-19 crisis. That which is seen is the money flowing from the federal government to the unemployed, to those taking leave due to rescue money given to businesses during the pandemic. While we might be aware in the abstract that there is an accompanying rise in U.S. government indebtedness, that which is not seen is the increase in taxes that must be paid by future generations. Nor do we see the slower economic growth that will be caused by the need to pay off this debt.
Even less obvious are the unseen effects of making permanent the supposedly temporary creation of federal paid-leave entitlements. While it’s easy to point to all the advantages of such a move for the 35 percent of women who didn’t have any such benefits pre-COVID-19, it’s more difficult to see the lower wages and employment that will result. Also hidden from our vision is the increase in employment discrimination fueled by this policy: When governments arbitrarily increase employers’ costs to hire certain groups, fewer members of those groups get hired. The academic literature is clear that such legislation inflicts very real negative effects on women.
Also harder to spot are the unseen effects of rent-control legislation. Such regulations exist in states and cities nationwide, though it wouldn’t be surprising to see more such policies implemented in this crisis’s wake. The benefits are easy to see. The rules promise to make housing in high-value rent markets more affordable for middle- and lower-class families. But once such legislation is implemented, reality kicks in.
We see rents going up more slowly than they likely would have otherwise. When paired with eviction protections, this policy gives an illusion of control to tenants who were already in rental homes when the regulation was adopted. What is unseen, however, is significant. Rent-control statutes reduce the incentives for property owners to supply their facilities as residential housing, and they make it less attractive for developers to build rental housing. Rent control even diminishes landlords’ willingness to maintain the quality of their units. The final result is less and lower-quality housing for ordinary people.”
“The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Stability Act, or CARES Act, signed into law by President Trump in March, was an unprecedented act of fiscal policy by the US government. It entailed measures that would have once seemed unthinkable, including an extra $600 in unemployment benefits, $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans, and billions of dollars in forgivable loans to small businesses. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews recently laid out, the Covid-19 response was larger than the stimulus policies put in place in response to the Great Recession and, from a fiscal standpoint, bigger than the New Deal.
It made a difference. Personal incomes actually went up in April thanks in large part to unemployment insurance and stimulus checks. Poverty rates didn’t increase.”
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“The stimulus bill had with it an underlying assumption that the economy would improve by the summer, and that was predicated on the country getting its outbreak under control. But the country didn’t — a series of public policy and leadership failures at the federal, state, and local levels have allowed the virus to thrive.”
“For Trump, Navarro, and the other neo-nationalists increasingly setting policy for the post-2016 Republican Party, America’s modern problems mostly stem from goods and people coming across the country’s borders. If a problem can’t be blamed on immigration, it probably will get blamed on trade. Sometimes both. And the neo-nationalists weren’t about to let the coronavirus crisis go to waste.
“If we learn anything from this crisis,” Navarro said in April, “it should be: Never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for essential medicines and countermeasures.”
This framing sounds like simple electoral politics. The Republican Party hopes to use the pandemic as an opportunity to double down on Trump’s “get tough on China” message that helped deliver key Rust Belt states in 2016.
But it’s more than that. Protectionism is now infecting the GOP to a degree that may be difficult to excise when the Trump era ends. Leading Republican lawmakers such as Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), who have been cheerleading Trump’s misguided tariff policy for years, are already positioning the coronavirus as an excuse to use federal power to reshape global trade. Even some formerly anti-Trump conservatives have been swayed into backing a nationalist vision of an America that must stand up to China or be swallowed by it. The COVID-19 outbreak has served only to confirm their fears.”
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“The right’s increasingly vocal trade skeptics have taken advantage of a crisis to advocate a national industrial policy designed not only to decouple the United States from the global trading network but to put America on dangerous Cold War–like footing with one of its biggest trade partners. In doing so, they’re pushing ideas that will leave America less prepared for the next pandemic—and have already left us less able to handle this one.”
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“Data from the World Trade Organization (WTO) show that over the past three years—both before and during Trump’s trade war with China—American consumers and businesses imported an average of $13.5 billion per year in medical supplies from China. That’s good enough to put China in fourth place, behind Switzerland ($15.5 billion annually, on average), Germany ($19.6 billion), and Ireland ($27.9 billion). America imported less than half the value of medical supplies from China in 2019 as it imported from Ireland, yet you probably didn’t hear many politicians and media personalities grandstanding about an overreliance on Irish manufacturing.
Meanwhile, an April report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that 70 percent of essential medical supplies consumed in the United States in 2018—including gloves, hand sanitizer, masks, and other key coronavirus-fighting stuff—were produced in the United States.”
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“In February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) touched off a brief panic with a statement warning that the coronavirus outbreak in China could disrupt supply chains and lead to a shortage of drugs in America. The neo-nationalists pounced. In a February letter to the FDA, Hawley called America’s supposed dependence on Chinese-made drugs “inexcusable.” Part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the $2.3 trillion aid bill passed by Congress and signed by Trump in March, calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to develop “strategies to…encourage domestic manufacturing” of pharmaceuticals. By May, the Trump administration had approved a $350 million grant for a little-known Virginia company that promised to make drugs in the United States. “This is a great day for America,” Navarro proclaimed at a press conference.
In the rush to throw taxpayer money at the problem, the White House didn’t wait to see if a problem actually existed. On June 2, an FDA official testified that the agency had found no evidence of shortages of drugs caused by foreign governments restricting exports.
The truth is that America’s global supply lines for pharmaceutical drugs are actually quite diverse and resilient. There are roughly 2,000 manufacturing facilities around the world authorized by the FDA to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients for American consumers; only 230 of those are in China. Some 510 are in the United States, and 1,048 are in the rest of the world. The supply chains for the 370 drugs on the World Health Organization’s list of “essential medicines,” which includes “anesthetic, antibacterial, antidepressant, antiviral, cardiovascular, anti-diabetic, and gastrointestinal agents,” are similarly global: 21 percent of production facilities are in the United States, with 15 percent located in China and 64 percent located somewhere else.”
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“As president, Trump has charted a go-it-alone strategy that emphasizes brute power over diplomatic finesse and that sees trade as a means by which other countries take advantage of the United States. Shortly after taking office in 2017, he yanked the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade agreement that was widely seen as the best way to put pressure on China to change some of its unacceptable behaviors. Instead of that multilateral effort, Trump sought a one-on-one confrontation that attempted to use tariffs to bully China into changing its ways. But his trade war has so far produced only meager results.
A “phase one” agreement signed in December 2019 did nothing to offset the huge costs to both economies of the tariffs the two countries have raised against one another. And the one big “win” secured by Trump—a promise that China would buy more American agricultural goods—seems unlikely to materialize in the face of a global recession.
That lone policy victory has been offset by numerous tangible losses. Since 2018, Trump has imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines. Other tariffs have been aimed at roughly $300 billion in annual imports from China—covering everything from industrial equipment to children’s toys. All together, those tariffs have sucked an estimated $80 billion out of the U.S. economy, according to an estimate from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax policy think tank.
The tariffs have also imposed a human toll, one that became more obvious during the coronavirus outbreak.
“Any disruption to this critical supply chain erodes the health care industry’s ability to deliver the quality and cost management outcomes that are key policy objectives of the country,” Matt Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at a hearing back in August 2018.
At the time, the administration was weighing whether to include products like hand sanitizer, thermometers, oxygen concentrators, surgical gloves, and other types of medical-grade protective gear in the list of Chinese-made items to be subjected to new tariffs. Rowan emphasized that such supplies were “essential to protecting health care providers and their patients” and would remain “a critical component of our nation’s response to public health emergencies.”
The most instantly noticeable effect of Trump’s tariffs was to increase the price of goods imported from China, including medical equipment. Importers would have no choice but to “almost immediately” pass along those price increases to “hospitals, surgery centers, long-term care facilities, individual consumers, and government programs who purchase our products,” Lara Simmons, the president of Medline Industries, one of the largest medical supply companies in the United States, said during a June 2019 hearing on the tariffs.
But the Trump administration went ahead with the tariffs anyway. Imports of medical equipment from China fell after the tariffs were imposed, and imports from other parts of the world did not increase enough to make up the difference. It’s likely that hospitals and other health care providers were drawing down on existing inventories and hoping the trade war would end before they had to restock, says PIIE’s Bown, who has analyzed changing supply chain patterns in the last few years.
Trump finally lifted tariffs on medical equipment after the pandemic struck. Unfortunately, the administration did nothing to remove tariffs on chemicals used to manufacture disinfectants and antiseptics—items that will be in even higher demand as the economy reopens.
“The tariff is making it more difficult for companies to supply our nation’s essential workers with antiseptics and sanitizing products they need to protect themselves and others from COVID-19,” says Chris Jahn, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council.
As the COVID-19 body count rose, Trump blamed China for making things worse by lying about the seriousness of the situation in December and January. The Communist regime in Beijing does deserve scorn for misleading the world about the pandemic’s true nature during the early days of the outbreak. But Trump is far too eager to deflect blame from how his own policies weakened America’s preparedness for the disease—and from how they might have made things much worse.”
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“When the coronavirus outbreak hit, 3M sprang into action: The company doubled its global production to 100 million N95 masks per month, with 35 million of those made in America. In early April, the company’s CEO, Mike Roman, announced additional investments in mask-making capacity that will allow the company to produce 50 million N95s in the U.S. by June. For that remarkable mobilization of private capital and workforce productivity in the face of a deadly pandemic, 3M earned scorn from the economic nationalists in the White House.
When Trump signed the executive order implementing the Defense Production Act on April 3, he issued a blistering statement accusing “unscrupulous brokers, distributors, and other intermediaries” of operating like “wartime profiteers” simply for selling goods to buyers in other countries. “This conduct denies our country and our people the materials they need to win the war against the virus,” Trump said. Though the formal statement did not mention 3M specifically, Trump was less diplomatic on Twitter. “We hit 3M hard today,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet, as if the company’s Minnesota headquarters were a newly discovered terrorist training ground. “[They] will have a big price to pay!”
What was 3M’s alleged crime against America? Daring to sell face masks to distributors in Canada.
Set aside the belligerence of the president’s remarks, and there is an intuitive appeal to what he’s arguing: America is facing a pandemic, the thinking goes, and we can’t afford to let go of necessary supplies—not even to a close ally like Canada. It’s every nation for itself. Shouldn’t Americans have those masks instead?
But 3M didn’t stand for the president’s shaming. In a statement, the company noted that in order to meet Americans’ needs it was importing more masks than ever from its production facilities in China. “Ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done,” 3M said. “If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease.”
The knockout blow was 3M’s revelation that its American mask production facilities rely on a special wood pulp imported from—yes—Canada. It was an incident that perfectly captured the myopia of Trump’s anti-trade agenda.”
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“in 2019, the U.S. imported more than $6 billion worth of PPE from around the world. If everyone followed the logic of “every country for itself,” America would end up with a net loss of equipment totaling nearly $5 billion. This year, the gap would probably be even larger, as production everywhere has increased in response to the pandemic.”
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“As a practical matter, it is obvious that the United States would be less capable of responding to the immediate COVID-19 crisis if it stopped trading with the rest of the world. “Re-shoring to America does not imply supply chain resilience,” Bown says. “In a pandemic, excessive reliance on anyone (including yourself) is bad.””
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“The Swiss medical supply outfit Hamilton Medical, for example, ramped up production by 50 percent in response to the outbreak in Europe. But then the company hit a snag. A key component of its ventilators came from Romania, a member of the European Union. Because the E.U. had imposed export restrictions on medical equipment and component parts, Hamilton Medical’s suppliers could no longer ship their wares to Switzerland, which is not an E.U. member.”
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“”We shouldn’t have supply chains. We should have them all in the United States,” Trump said in that same May 14 interview, spelling it out for all to hear. This has never been solely about strategically countering a competitor’s rise or trying to shift supply chains away from a potentially hostile communist country. It’s about autarky, or at least about detaching America from the global trading systems that have helped lift much of the world out of poverty.
That’s not a recipe for prosperity at home. It makes no more sense than suggesting that Ohio would prosper if it decided tomorrow to stop trading with the other 49 states.”
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“As the virus abates, the world will probably reconsider the approach it has taken toward China. If there are individual items for which America is heavily dependent on that country—particular medicines, perhaps—then manufacturers should look to further diversify supply chains. The federal government could encourage that behavior by lowering tariffs for imports from countries that compete with China to produce medical gear and pharmaceuticals. Pursuing nativist “buy American” policies or other forms of protectionism is neither the only solution nor the best one.
But the benefits of free trade and global economic integration created by decades of peaceful cooperation between nations should not be reconsidered. Taxing imports weakened America in advance of the pandemic. Raising barriers to trade made it more difficult to combat COVID-19 once the crisis hit. Nationalism will leave the world sicker and poorer.
Despite all that evidence to the contrary, Hawley, Trump, Navarro, and others seek to use the coronavirus as a cudgel to smash the system of global trade. They would replace it with an alternative that leaves America less free, less prosperous, and less capable of handling the next crisis.”
“The conventional next step would be phase three trials, in which thousands of participants at risk of the targeted infection are randomized to receive either the vaccine or a control placebo. The trial participants are then monitored by researchers as they go about their usual lives to see how many of the vaccinated people (vs. those in the placebo group) actually come down with the disease. This stately process of evaluation takes a considerable amount of time to unfold.
Human challenge trials, also known as controlled human infection studies, would greatly speed up the process of identifying effective vaccines and treatments for the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, some prominent bioethicists are arguing that it’s time to recruit some healthy and willing young people, inject them with various experimental coronavirus vaccines, and then expose them to the virus to see if any of the vaccines work. Instead of waiting around for the virus to find (vaccinated and unvaccinated) folks in the wild—as researchers do in regular phase three trials—human challenge trials speed things up by purposely bringing the virus to the study participants.”
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“As of press time, pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna and Pfizer seemed content to dawdle along with conventional phase three trials, but we can hope that that will change. Human challenge trials could really crank up the warp factor in the search for an effective COVID-19 vaccine.”
“So why was I once again sanguine about Florida? Because despite the surge in positive cases, the number of deaths remained extremely low, and I believed that deaths were the most concrete way to measure the pandemic’s toll. It’s not that hospitalization data isn’t important, but it’s hard to come by and often unreliable. Some people have reported long-lasting and debilitating symptoms, but we don’t know yet whether they are common or rare. All through June, the average number of daily Covid-19 deaths in Florida remained below 40. I thought then — and I think now — that that was remarkable.
In retrospect, it’s clear that DeSantis — as well as governors in Texas, Arizona, California and a lot of other states — reopened too early because they too were swayed by their low death rates and were eager to get their economies back on track. They didn’t anticipate how opening bars, in particular, would spread the virus. They weren’t willing to get tough on people who refused to wear masks. Perhaps most important, they didn’t pay enough attention to the reproduction rate — that is, the estimate of the number of people each Covid-positive person would infect. (In Florida, according to one model, it is 1.42)”
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“When you look at the states that are facing surges right now — Florida, Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, and others(3)— they follow the same pattern. They saw very little of the virus when the Northeast was getting crushed. They let their guard down — even bragged about their success. Then, when it turned out that virus had simply taken its sweet time making its way south and west, it took them too long to awaken to the threat.
Although the positive case numbers are terrible across the board, the death rates are still low. Texas has 347,000 cases but only 4,100 deaths. Mississippi has 45,000 cases and 1,400 deaths. Arizona has 149,000 cases, and less than 3,000 deaths. Florida’s 380,000 positive cases had yielded 5,435 deaths as of Wednesday.
Whenever I bring this up, I’m reminded that deaths are a lagging indicator. But this surge began in early June; if the virus were acting the same way it did in the Northeast, the death rate would be far higher by now. I also realize that doctors know a lot more about how to treat Covid-19. But that can’t be the whole answer either. For reasons not yet understood, the virus simply isn’t killing as many people in these states as it did in New York and New Jersey in March and April. The one thing we can say with some certainty is that it’s not the governors’ doing.”
“Covid-19 testing in the US improved dramatically over the first half of 2020, but things now appear to be breaking down once more as coronavirus cases rise and outstrip capacity — to the point that the mayor of a major American city can’t get testing quickly enough to potentially avoid spreading the virus.”
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““Basically, two things are happening,” Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI), told me. “One is the outbreaks are getting much bigger, so the amount of testing we need to get our arms around the outbreak is going up. And second, what we did [before] was some tweaking on capacity issues to get ourselves up to 500,000 to 600,000 tests a day, but didn’t fundamentally address the supply chain problems.”
He added, “This was supposed to be the job of the White House. … But they just never have prioritized really building up a robust testing infrastructure for the country.””
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“The benchmark of 500,000 tests per day was particularly important, as it was the minimum experts had long called for in order to get the pandemic in the US under control.
But as the country neared that benchmark, attention to testing seemed to plummet. The Trump administration, which had already delegated testing down to lower levels of government and private actors, especially appeared to lose interest: The country’s “testing czar,” Brett Giroir, stood down and went back to his regular job at the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump falsely claimed in May that “America leads the world in testing”; at his Tulsa rally in June, he said he told his people to “slow the testing down” because the rising case count made him look bad. (He later asserted that his statement at the rally was not a joke, despite White House officials insisting it was.)
As all this happened, many of the underlying problems with testing capacity remained.
For one, there’s still a lot of variation between states. While most states, as of July 8, had 150 new tests per 100,000 people per day — the equivalent to 500,000 daily tests nationwide — 18 states still didn’t.”
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“Earlier on, the hurdles with testing were linked to supply chain problems: not enough swabs to collect samples, vials to store them, or reagents and kits to run the tests. Over time, those problems were fixed or worked around.
The issue, experts say, is that these kinds of problems were always bound to come back as testing demand increased. Fixing a bottleneck for kits may let the country get to 500,000 tests a day, but that bottleneck can easily come back if, for instance, the nation needs 1 million per day and there are only enough kits for 700,000.”
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“labs aren’t sure that making the massive investment for way more tests is financially sustainable, he explained, especially as Covid-19 outbreaks ebb and flow — and, as a result, occasionally deplete demand for those tests, as well as the number of people who need them.
Ideally, the federal government would be in charge of handling these problems. It’s the one entity that can go to labs across the country, see what the holdups are, then work along the global supply chain to see what can be done to address the issues. It has the funding ability to ensure labs and suppliers remain whole. And it can prioritize limited resources to specific cities, counties, or states that need them most, instead of leaving these supplies to a free-for-all.
This is, in fact, what the federal government does with other issues — such as when it ensures that a manufacturer has all the parts needed for an order of guns, tanks, or jets.”
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“The Trump administration, however, has described the federal government as a “supplier of last resort.” That’s very different from the kind of proactive approach the feds take on other issues to get ahead of supply constraints.
So the problem is left to private actors as well as local and state governments, which often face legal, financial, and practical constraints that hinder their ability to move quickly. And the problem persists, even as Covid-19 cases continue to rise.”
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“Lockdowns, however, were also supposed to buy the nation time to build up its testing system. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, previously told me, “The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work. If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”
It’s now clear that the US didn’t take full advantage of the time it bought with lockdowns. While testing did dramatically improve compared to the early days of the pandemic, it’s still not at a point where America can handle the higher demand brought on by another surge in coronavirus cases.
“It’s pathetic. This is not how a first-world country functions,” Jha said. “That people should not expect to access a test to an infectious disease many, many months into a pandemic — I find myself amazed that this is where we are as a country.””
“much of California let its guard down. While the state, and the Bay Area in particular, was among the first in the US to embrace a shelter-at-home order, parts of California have since relaxed or outright halted those measures, letting the coronavirus creep in bit by bit. Meanwhile, precautions against Covid-19 have been inconsistently adopted by the public and businesses — especially as some of the recommended practices, such as wearing a mask, have become politicized.
At the same time, the state has seen major outbreaks in nursing homes, in prisons, and among migrant workers — many of whom are deemed “essential” and are therefore forced to work — that have driven up coronavirus cases further, simultaneously planting seeds for broader community outbreaks.”
““Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection.
While there’s still much we don’t understand about immunity to this new illness, a small but growing number of cases like his suggest the answer is yes.
Covid-19 may also be much worse the second time around. During his first infection, my patient experienced a mild cough and sore throat. His second infection, in contrast, was marked by a high fever, shortness of breath, and hypoxia, resulting in multiple trips to the hospital.
Recent reports and conversations with physician colleagues suggest my patient is not alone. Two patients in New Jersey, for instance, appear to have contracted Covid-19 a second time almost two months after fully recovering from their first infection. Daniel Griffin, a physician and researcher at Columbia University in New York, recently described a case of presumed reinfection on the This Week in Virology podcast.
It is possible, but unlikely, that my patient had a single infection that lasted three months. Some Covid-19 patients (now dubbed “long haulers”) do appear to suffer persistent infections and symptoms.
My patient, however, cleared his infection — he had two negative PCR tests after his first infection — and felt healthy for nearly six weeks.”
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“repeat infections in a short period are a feature of many viruses, including other coronaviruses. So if some Covid-19 patients are getting reinfected after a second exposure, it would not be particularly unusual.”
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“Herd immunity depends on the theory that our immune systems, once exposed to a pathogen, will collectively protect us as a community from reinfection and further spread.”
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“Experts generally consider natural herd immunity a worst-case-scenario backup plan. It requires mass infection (and, in the case of Covid-19, massive loss of life because of the disease’s fatality rate) before protection takes hold.”
“The controversy surrounding the PPP, which supports businesses with 500 employees or fewer, has a lot to do with a disconnect between the program’s design and how Americans think about business. The real goal of the PPP was to keep American workers on payroll, not to simply keep small businesses going. And so the majority of the money was disbursed to businesses with more employees, rather than to tiny ones with small staffs. That’s why a program widely perceived as being meant to boost the United States’ most vulnerable small businesses ended up prioritizing businesses that aren’t actually that small.”
“In a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this past weekend, President Donald Trump used the term “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus, one of several racist statements he made during a wide-ranging speech that touched on his administration’s handling of the pandemic.
“By the way, it’s a disease, without question, [that] has more names than any disease in history,” Trump said at the time. “I can name kung flu, I can name 19 different versions of names.”
Since then, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has gone on to defend his use of the term. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been noncommittal: When asked how he and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, felt about Trump’s remarks, McConnell declined to say whether he was comfortable with the president’s rhetoric, instead suggesting that the question should be directed to Chao, who immigrated from Taiwan to the US as a child.
McEnany’s defense of Trump is the same flimsy one he’s been using ever since he began calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus:” She argued that such names simply associate the illness with its “place of origin,” an effort that even if conducted in good faith goes against World Health Organization guidelines that warn against promoting labels that could stigmatize an entire region.
“The president does not believe it’s offensive to note that the virus came from China,” McEnany said during a briefing on Monday.”
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“Trump’s decision to lean into racist rhetoric — including terminology his own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has condemned in the past — comes as Asian Americans continue to report hate incidents such as verbal abuse, physical assault, and property damage during the pandemic. As the coronavirus spread around the world, tropes that treat Asians as perpetual foreigners have also resurfaced, fueling racist and hostile anti-Asian sentiment.
Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s been tracking self-reported hostile anti-Asian incidents since late March, says it’s received more than 2,100 reports since the project began. Such incidents have included instances of employees getting shunned in the workplace, families being spat on at fast food restaurants, and children getting beaten up by their classmates. The group says it saw a surge in reports after Trump began using rhetoric like the “Chinese virus” and noted that many “anti-China” comments were frequently associated with verbal and physical assaults.
“A White male walked by me and said, ‘you f—king Chinese spread the Coronavirus to this country, you should all leave this country!’” one incident report read.
“A woman sitting at a bus stop was screaming at myself and other Asians that she saw walking,” read another. “She said that we were ‘dirty Chinese,’ that we were trying to take over the US.”
Researchers, too, emphasize that Trump’s rhetoric has mattered in the past: An NBC News report by Kimmy Yam points to a February study, which determined that Trump’s racist comments against Latino Americans “emboldened” others who held similar views to express them.
Trump’s continued use of racist statements about the coronavirus — ultimately trying to deflect blame by pointing out it is foreign-born — comes as he struggles to deal with the fallout of his own handling of the pandemic: Most recently he came under fire for saying he intends to slow down coronavirus testing because doing so would reveal the presence of fewer cases.
“President Trump continues to utilize white supremacist and nationalist views as a means of scapegoating his failures for political gain,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, in a statement. “Unless we hold him accountable, the discrimination and harassment against Asian Americans will become deeply entrenched, cause unimaginable harm and suffering, and take decades to unwind.””