By Prof. Armando Vazquez-Ramos, President and CEO
The California-Mexico Studies Center, Inc. ~ April 14, 2020
Given Governor Gavin Newsom’s commendable "Nation State" response to President Trump’s intransigence and failure to provide California with critical federal government assistance, the governor emerges as a novel international moral leader to abate the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
Last week, during an interview on MSNBC, the Governor stated that he would use California’s massive purchasing power “as a nation-state” to secure the medical supplies that Trump’s government has failed to provide. In fact, the governor expressed that “California might even export some of those supplies to other states in need”.
This is the fundamental reason why the California-Mexico Studies Center is calling upon Governor Newsom and California’s legislative leaders to immediately respond to Mexico’s emerging COVID-19 crisis, at our neighboring state of Baja California.
As the world’s fifth largest economy with $3.14-trillion GDP, California’s foremost economic partner is Mexico, ranked as the 13th largest global economy. Ironically, the exploding pandemic crisis in Tijuana and Mexico City creates an opportunity to contain the Coronavirus and save thousands of lives, with its recently acquired $1.4-billion contract for 200 million respiratory systems and surgical masks.
Undoubtedly, the crisis in Tijuana has been exacerbated by Trump’s massive deportations of more than 10,000 ICE detainees since mid-March 2020, including children separated from their parents, at Mexico’s border towns like human dumping grounds, due to the fear of contamination by U.S. border enforcement and detention center personnel.
In particular, as reported last week by the San Diego Tribune, Tijuana hospitals have been overwhelmed and doctors describe the city as a “war zone” where there’s a major outbreak of COVID-19 cases amongst physicians, nurses and other medical staff exposed to the virus without protection.
According to the San Diego Tribune, “Hospital General’s chief of internal medicine, Dr. Francisco Alejandro Gutiérrez Manjarrez, sent an urgent letter Thursday (April 9, 2020) to state health officials highlighting the hospital’s need for more personal protection equipment, including gloves, N95 masks and shoe covers.”
Moreover, “Gutiérrez’s letter said the personal protection equipment would be ‘used to care for patients with atypical pneumonia, suspicion and confirmation of SARS-COV2 infection’. The phrasing is significant because Gutiérrez is the first local doctor to officially link atypical pneumonia cases with coronavirus infections.”
This assessment is even more alarming when you consider that “Hugo López-Gatell, who serves in Mexico’s Ministry of Health as an undersecretary for health promotion and prevention, said Wednesday (April 8, 2020) that the number of actual coronavirus cases is ‘almost certainly’ 8.3 times more than the number of confirmed cases. López-Gatell said he based his estimates on the same modeling and extrapolation health officials already use to track cases of influenza”.
Thus, we call upon Governor Newsom to exercise his leadership in response to the predictable COVID-19 explosion in the San Diego-Tijuana region, and apply his “nation-state” doctrine across the border with the support of California’s legislative leaders and Latino Caucus.
While we consider this critical situation to require the governor’s urgent response, we also recognize that this collaboration must be engaged with the governments of Baja California and the federal government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Moreover, this call to action needs to involve the leadership of higher education institutions and the governments of Mexico City and the City of Los Angeles.
May the leadership of Governor Newsom and California’s “Nation-State” doctrine respond to the menace of COVID-19’s pandemic across the California-Mexico border.
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