This is still anecdotal but sadly suggestive of worse news to come. The Associated Press reports that Mexican cities adjoining Southern California are where most of the new cases of COVID-19 are appearing other than in Mexico City itself:
At least one American border region is experiencing a spike in hospitalizations that some believe is driven by American citizens who live in Mexico coming to the U.S. for care.
But in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities, many doctors, health officials and ordinary citizens worry about the disease coming in the other direction.
San Diego — with roughly the same population as Tijuana — has triple the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19, at more than 6,000. The state of California has about 10 times as many people as the Mexican state of Baja California to the south — but reported more than 20 times the number of cases. Mexico has a notoriously low testing rate, but that alone seems an insufficient explanation.
Tijuana saw its cases begin to rise significantly in late March soon after California shuttered many businesses and ordered people to stay home, said Dr. Remedios Lozada, who is in charge of the Tijuana health district. It appears that much of the surge came from dual nationals and legal residents like Gama, who wanted to be closer to family or live more cheaply in Tijuana during the shutdown.
“There were a lot of people who emigrated here to Mexico,†Lozada said. “That was when we began facing the higher number of cases.â€
Tijuana’s hospitals became swamped with suspected COVID-19 patients. Desperate relatives demanded information about their loved ones outside medical facilities. Nurses and doctors protested that they didn’t have the necessary protective equipment as the virus swept through their ranks.
Baja California Gov. Jaime Bonilla said in mid-April that the public health system’s doctors in the state were “dropping like flies†because they lacked protective gear.
I’ve been warning of this for months. We might be able to prevent our own outbreak of COVID-19 from overwhelming our health care system. How we will prevent our outbreak from overwhelming Mexico’s health care system eludes me.
California’s attitude towards its border with Mexico has always been risky but as long as most of the risks were being borne by the U. S. Mexico had few incentives to control the situation.
Either both countries need to get control of their borders or the U. S. will need to control the flow of people between California and surrounding states, neither alternative being particularly likely or attractive. What’s more likely is that as long as there’s an outbreak in Baja there will be one in Southern California and vice versa.
To keep matters in perspective the outbreak in Mexico remains minor compared to that in the U. S. just as that in California is minor relative to that in the New York City metropolitan area. We had best hope that the virus does, indeed, tend to wane in the summer heat. Or the challenge will be keeping it that way.
