Corona-zona

Yesterday's New York Times had a  story about people circumventing U.S. restrictions on testing for people traveling home from abroad. They are exploiting a loophole in the laws that requires tests for people entering the country by air but not by land.  So people who go abroad and test positive change their flights to arrive in Canada or Mexico then drive across the border. Because they have, y'know, shit to do ! One woman at least gave some consideration to her state of health and whether she might be infectious, but ultimately said she didn't follow the rules because she thought they were dumb: I had zero symptoms, no fever, nothing. I felt fine and when you’re stateside, the C.D.C. says you can end isolation five days after testing positive, so the same rules should apply when I’m traveling. It makes no sense that I can go to a wedding five days after a positive test in Miami, but if I catch the virus when I’m on vacation I can’t fly home. That should be illegal. She ...

  [Today's post is a by Corona-zona Senior Mexico Correspondent Cuitláhuac] As a Yanqui (and former Arizonan) living in Mexico City since 2017, I’ve watched from a safe distance the political and epidemiological goings-on in the USA. We discovered my wife was pregnant in early February of 2020, and so we spent the entire pregnancy under lockdown. Since the birth of my son in September 24  we’ve remained battened down. COVID-19 has ravaged Mexico.  We just passed India – a country with over ten times our population – to become third in the number of pandemic deaths, behind the USA and Brazil.  Mexico’s leader, President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO), is a populist in the mold of Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, but leaning left rather than right. Like his conservative brethren, AMLO downplayed COVID-19, exhorting Mexicans to live life normally and eat at restaurants for the good of the economy.  He has argued that the poor will be unaffected and t...