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"He, like so many others, would not have died if American leaders — President Trump and governors like Ducey — hadn’t been so cavalier about pushing consumers to spend money. They have blood on their hands. "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...t-4-0_opinion-card-d-right:homepage/story-ans
‘If you don’t have an underlying health condition, it’s safe out there,” Gov. Doug Ducey told Arizonans in late May, hoping to stimulate the economy. Those words were also a death sentence for Dad, a healthy and exuberant 65-year-young man named Mark Anthony Urquiza.
He, like so many others, would not have died if American leaders — President Trump and governors like Ducey — hadn’t been so cavalier about pushing consumers to spend money. They have blood on their hands.
When a shelter-in-place order took effect in March, both my parents believed in mask-wearing and social distancing. I work to reduce zoonotic transmission of disease by protecting tropical rainforests from deforestation, so I’d been talking to them about the coronavirus for months. We watched in horror as New York brought in refrigerated trucks and dug mass graves.
I was particularly worried for their safety because of who they are and where they live. The data shows that Latino people are three times more likely than White people to contract coronavirus and twice as likely to die of it. My dad, a Mexican American, was a front-line worker in the manufacturing industry. Like most people of color, he didn’t have the luxury of simply working from home or taking a leave of absence. Not working meant not getting a paycheck. He was part of the skeleton crew that kept the economy going, until he was furloughed in late April.
I also suspected that Maryvale, the Phoenix neighborhood where I grew up and where my parents still lived, would become a hot spot: Public health crises explode in the poorest Zip codes, the communities suffering most from government disinvestment.
Maryvale is more than 75 percent Hispanic, with 30 percent of its residents medically uninsured; about 28 percent live below the federal poverty line. By June, when Arizona outnumbered cases per capita globally, my parents’ Zip code was the state’s epicenter.
Meanwhile, testing was woefully inaccessible, leaving people standing in lines for 13 hours — in 115-degree weather — in hopes of getting a test.
Americans collectively honor ‘warriors,’ but that doesn’t extend to coronavirus casualties
But by the time Arizona started to reopen on May 15, I couldn’t compete with the message coming out of the White House, projected across cable news and reinforced by Ducey. Dad was a Republican. He watched Fox News, and he had voted for Ducey and Trump.
When they told him not to live in fear, that very few people would catch the disease, that its effects weren’t serious, he believed them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...t-4-0_opinion-card-d-right:homepage/story-ans
‘If you don’t have an underlying health condition, it’s safe out there,” Gov. Doug Ducey told Arizonans in late May, hoping to stimulate the economy. Those words were also a death sentence for Dad, a healthy and exuberant 65-year-young man named Mark Anthony Urquiza.
He, like so many others, would not have died if American leaders — President Trump and governors like Ducey — hadn’t been so cavalier about pushing consumers to spend money. They have blood on their hands.
When a shelter-in-place order took effect in March, both my parents believed in mask-wearing and social distancing. I work to reduce zoonotic transmission of disease by protecting tropical rainforests from deforestation, so I’d been talking to them about the coronavirus for months. We watched in horror as New York brought in refrigerated trucks and dug mass graves.
I was particularly worried for their safety because of who they are and where they live. The data shows that Latino people are three times more likely than White people to contract coronavirus and twice as likely to die of it. My dad, a Mexican American, was a front-line worker in the manufacturing industry. Like most people of color, he didn’t have the luxury of simply working from home or taking a leave of absence. Not working meant not getting a paycheck. He was part of the skeleton crew that kept the economy going, until he was furloughed in late April.
I also suspected that Maryvale, the Phoenix neighborhood where I grew up and where my parents still lived, would become a hot spot: Public health crises explode in the poorest Zip codes, the communities suffering most from government disinvestment.
Maryvale is more than 75 percent Hispanic, with 30 percent of its residents medically uninsured; about 28 percent live below the federal poverty line. By June, when Arizona outnumbered cases per capita globally, my parents’ Zip code was the state’s epicenter.
Meanwhile, testing was woefully inaccessible, leaving people standing in lines for 13 hours — in 115-degree weather — in hopes of getting a test.
Americans collectively honor ‘warriors,’ but that doesn’t extend to coronavirus casualties
But by the time Arizona started to reopen on May 15, I couldn’t compete with the message coming out of the White House, projected across cable news and reinforced by Ducey. Dad was a Republican. He watched Fox News, and he had voted for Ducey and Trump.
When they told him not to live in fear, that very few people would catch the disease, that its effects weren’t serious, he believed them.
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