Posted by This came across my newsfeed today but hidden way down in the articles of the SCMP. Hong Kong fourth wave: officials warn members of ethnic minorities helping spread Covid-19 as another 107 cases emerge. I have wanted to write about this topic for some time and in fact, before I read the headline, I knew it would be politically charged and would guess that all the SJWs lurking out there would quickly cry racism in the comments. With that it mind, I started this piece before I even read the article and comments which I will reproduce partially as I go along as the SCMP has gone to a subscription model and might not be totally available.
“Health authorities warning that a quarter of cases over the past two weeks involved members of ethnic minority communities, many of them crammed into old tenement buildings in one of the city’s most rundown neighbourhoods.” Remember that despite being a modern cosmopolitan city, Hong Kong is still a Chinese city with over 90% of the population being ethnic Chinese so this is a huge number as of the 8% that are not Chinese, over half are from the Philippines and Indonesian (domestic helpers) while under 15% of these are South Asian (India, Nepal and Pakistan) so South Asians account for less than 2% of the population. “Officials confirmed 107 cases citywide [Monday 18 January] – the highest since 109 infections were recorded on December 19 last year – and reported that 28 of them were found through testing in the Yau Tsim Mong district, where they said a failure to observe social-distancing rules among residents of mostly South Asian descent was contributing to the spread of the disease.” Bear in mind that in America, Canada and Europe, a daily case count of 107 in a city of 8 million people would be considered an amazing feat in “bending the curve” so the number is relative.
“Authorities ordered residents of seven more buildings in Yau Tsim Mong to undergo mandatory testing, while a senior health official linked the growing outbreak among families from ethnic minority groups to both their cultural backgrounds and social conditions, with many living in subdivided flats. ‘They have many family gatherings and like to gather with fellow countrymen,’ said Raymond Ho Lei-ming, head of the health promotion branch at the Centre for Health Protection. ‘They like to share food, smoke, drink alcohol and chat together. If it is without masks, the risk is high. They also need to share sanitary facilities with neighbours if the living environment is crowded.’ Ho added they were engaging in ‘behaviour that put them at risk’.
Wow, that’s an amazing statement. If an official were to say that in Canada or the States, the media and liberals would be jumping on him like crazy calling him a racist and demanding that he be fired. Remember, I’m reading the SCMP article at the same time that I’m writing this article so I’m commenting off the cuff here.
“According to Chuang, about 160 of the 661 local cases recorded since January 4 involved residents living in Yau Tsim Mong, while a quarter involved members of ethnic minority communities, most of them Nepalese but some were Indian. The district is home to 9.1 per cent of the city’s roughly 580,000 members of ethnic minority communities, data from a by-census in 2016 shows.”
“But Pete Cheng Juk-hei, communication officer of ethnic minority concern group Unison, slammed officials for linking cultural practices with the recent surges of infections. Cheng pointed out that gathering to eat, smoke or drink while talking was not just part of the daily lives of many members of ethnic minority communities but something found across the public. ‘I’m worried that this kind of categorisation will reinforce stereotyping,’ he said. Cheng urged the government to focus on the community members’ socioeconomic status and crowded living conditions, which could contribute to the spread of outbreaks. Officials should also improve their cultural sensitivity to avoid making assumptions about them that were unconsciously biased, he said.”
Finally, we have one of the woke liberal types piping up their usual litany of crap. I agree with Cheng in that there should not be stereotypes or victim blaming but it is clear that there is a specific cluster that needs to be addressed and by sticking your head in the sand and saying that its not a problem is hardly a solution. Nowhere in the other pronouncements did I sense any real racism; the health officials were pointing out that there was a clear and specific problem with a certain subgroup of the population and that they should be aware and take steps to mitigate this. But I suspect that the real SJWs would lurk in the comment section and when I looked, sure enough:
The usual litany of not so clever smart ass (only their nether regions are smart because no other part of them, especially their brains, are actually clever) liberals. I particularly like the second guy who uses a phrase like “typical Hong Kong Cantonese” (which is itself an amazing racist stereotype of his own) while denouncing racism.
I like the clear and concise numbers of the report from the Hong Kong health authorities. Maybe Raymond Ho, should not have added so much other comments about eating and gathering habits but to point out the problem and ask that people take extra care is precisely what health officials should be doing. They should not be trying to hide a problem and mask it for fear of reprisals and accusations that you are racist by pointing out facts and zeroing in on problem areas. I do believe that there are socio-cultural and ethnic problems that do present a challenge to containing the Covid-19 pandemic and by wringing your hands and blaming it all of systemic racism is not the way to go about addressing it. Before I continue, of course there are exceptions and stupidity in every race and ethnic and cultural group. I notice the angry anti-mask and Covid-19 is a hoax “just like the flu” conspiracy nutters are primarily white as they gather in mass protests without masks and social distancing. Here’s a photo of the anti-mask rally in Calgary, Canada. I looked long and hard (and zoomed it) and it looks to be a pretty much white only crowd there. I’ve also noticed the same in virtually every anti-mask rally photo I’ve seen in every news report in Canada and the United States.
This sort of political pandering in the face of a pandemic is precisely why most Western countries in Europe and America have been so bad at controlling the Covid-19 outbreak. Anti-mask rallies should be condemned but Black Lives Matter protests are OK. Sorry, they should all be banned if large group gatherings are prohibited; the “worthiness” of your cause is not a factor.
Yes, calling it the “China or Wuhan virus” is racist and unhelpful precisely because doing so is a political tool and not a call to action or a search for the truth and solutions. It is not simply a statement of “that’s where it came from” because we don’t know that’s where it came from; we just know that Wuhan was where it was first reported and diagnosed. If that is indeed your point of view, then the current mutation that was first reported in England last September and by the time they reported it in December, it had already become the most predominant strain of the virus spreading in the UK and elsewhere should be called the more transmissible “London mutation.” It is not and rightly so as it helps no one and serves no purpose (other than a political one) to label it as such. Should we have cut flights to China right away? In hindsight, probably yes just as we cut flights to the UK once they announced that the mutation was about 70% more transmissible. Was there a coverup? Well, in the case of China, at most you could say was they were slow to announce the true extent of the outbreak and even then, it was only a few days. In their defense, Covid-19 was a new disease and they had no clue what they were dealing with and once they did, they did release the whole genome to the world pretty quickly. All the signals were there; the rest of Asia including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan went into crisis mode pretty quickly. It is only the West that dithered and ignored the threat until it became painfully obvious that they were not immune to the spread and then the political blame machine and media went into overdrive claiming a cover up. Sorry, everyone, including the Chinese community in places like Vancouver were already taking precautions in January (like me stocking up on masks and sanitizers) and getting laughed at by white people for “over-reacting” only to get it thrown back in my face two months later. In the case of the UK, they already had sequenced the mutation but waited three months until it was by far the most prevalent strain of Covid-19 before they warned the public and the rest of the world. I don’t blame the UK for that, its just what politicians tend to do and they are the ones making the decisions, not the scientists.
But we are so far down the rabbit hole of political correctness and pandering that we cannot report simple facts without spinning it. We all know that Covid-19 has disproportionally impacted on blacks in the United States. The simple facts are:
And there are many reasons for this which the press has reported on in detail. “The Virus Is Showing Black People What They Knew All Along.” is the headline in the Atlantic. You can do your own search and you will find a plethora of news stories basically saying the same thing. What you will not find is many articles pointing out the other abnormality in that chart because it doesn’t fit into the SJW narrative. That Asian Americans have by far the lowest rate of Covid mortalities and infections; even much lower than the “privileged” whites. While SJW’s tend to always frame their world-view as literally black and white, the other hues of brown and yellow seem to go under the radar for the most part.
This is not only an American phenomenon but the narrative tends to be scripted there and then transports itself across the border to Canada and to the rest of the Western world. Here in the Great White North, the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation muses, “Black people and other people of colour make up 83% of reported COVID-19 cases in Toronto.” “Black people and other people of colour make up 83 per cent of reported COVID-19 cases while only making up half of Toronto’s population, according to the latest data from the city. Dr. Eileen de Villa, along with Toronto Mayor John Tory, and other officials, presented new findings and data trends on Thursday afternoon that show racialized and lower income communities in the city are disproportionately affected by the novel coronavirus.”
I found the Toronto data to be of particular interest because unlike most studies in America which lump everyone into this huge category of “Asian”, it actually went and broke down the sub-categories of Asian. East Asian in the context of Toronto is primarily Chinese but includes Koreans and Japanese. Southeast Asians is primarily Filipino although it includes all the ASEAN states. What we see is that East Asian have a much lower rate of Covid infection than even the “privileged” whites which brings down the total of the entire “Asian” category. And yes, the Covid infection rates of South Asian and Southeast Asians is much higher than than their proportion of the population; in the case of South Asians, approaching that of the black population. In other words, all Asians are not the same despite our pathetic attempt to lump everyone into the category of Asian-American and it has major implications for our policy responses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sadly, all our biased press can do is frame it in the black-white dichotomy that dominates American politics which is interesting as infection rates of those of Middle East or Hispanic is even much higher than those of blacks in Toronto; despite what the headline reads.
Of course, I kind of knew this already before they even collected that data. Richmond, British Columbia (part of Greater Vancouver) has the distinction of being the first majority Chinese city in Canada. Not only that, the Vancouver International Airport is in Richmond which means the “Wuhan virus” should have hit there first and hardest due to the close and frequent links back to China and Asia. Instead, we see that, “Richmond mayor credits proactive Chinese population for keeping COVID-19 cases down” “New data released by the province shows Richmond has the lowest number of cases, per capita, in all of Metro Vancouver.” In turn, British Columbia has by far the lowest Covid-19 infection rates in all of major provinces Canada. Missing from the analysis is the fact that in the Greater Vancouver area, Surrey is one of the hardest hit by Covid-19 and that is, no points for guessing, where the greatest concentration of South Asians are. It is a trend that is repeated ad nauseum across the country as we see from this CBC report “Alberta is now collecting race-based COVID-19 data but won’t publish it yet“. “Albertans of South & East Asian descent account for just under 20 per cent of COVID-19 cases, but represent only 11 per cent of the population,” The tweet was one of several Wolf posted in response to what he described as misplaced outrage from some of Premier Jason Kenney’s critics over Kenney’s recent comments about high caseloads in northeast Calgary, where many immigrants live. “Some are arguing that the premier is ‘blaming’ or ‘stigmatizing’ Albertans by trying to raise awareness amongst cultural communities about how to slow the spread,” Wolf tweeted. “No, the premier is not ‘blaming’ any groups of Albertans. COVID-19 affects all elements of our society. But data does show that some cultural communities are disproportionately affected.”
Yup, basically the same problem as they just reported in Hong Kong except without the huge media and liberal SJW backlash because those types of idiots are a mostly Western phenomenon. I’m sure there are many reasons for this disparity. Income and education, types of jobs that certain ethnic groups are clustered in (like the Filipino’s at the Cargill meat processing plant in High River south of Calgary which was the single largest outbreak of Covid-19 in North America during the first phase last spring). But this is exactly what we need to know and we need to address this honestly and truthfully if we are to find ways to mitigate the damage and spread of the disease. But liberals would rather us all put our head in the sand and ignore the truth for fear of appearing to be “racist” and ignore data and facts that are smacking us right in our faces.
Update 1 (February 8, 2021): The Canadian Brainwashing Corporation reports, “Here’s why COVID-19 numbers have dropped among B.C.’s South Asian population“. “Community organizers in British Columbia are being credited with helping to bring down the spread of COVID-19 within the South Asian community. ‘There’s been a huge amount of commitment from our partners ranging from Gurdwaras, schools, community agencies, businesses [and] media outlets to really support and come together to ensure there’s culturally appropriate messaging and culturally appropriate advice,’ said Fraser Health CEO Dr. Victoria Lee. B.C. doesn’t track race-based COVID-19 data, but the Fraser Health Authority is home to the three municipalities with the highest concentrations of South Asians in the province — Surrey.”
Now the interesting thing is that the same search of “Surrey”, “Covid” and “CBC” will bring you up this article about how the South Asian community has worked to bring down the rate of infection in Surrey but it won’t bring up any initial article about the original sharp rise in infections in the South Asian community. Oh, people knew about it; they would figure it out from the raw data or from social media or word of mouth. But it was clear that there was a specific area and community that needed to be targeted for action and the CBC neglected to inform us of it; precisely because they wanted to avoid being called racist. No, I don’t think you should blame South Asians for the spike in Covid cases and the possibility of backlash, especially amongst the ignorant, is not to be dismissed. But the complete censoring of truthful, accurate and important information in a pathetic attempt to be politically correct an not acceptable alternative either.