Trump and many conservative pundits have gone out of their way to refer to the novel coronavirus as the "China virus."
The obvious goal of calling it the "China virus" is to deflect blame away Trump's White House and onto the Chinese government, but most cases in the United States did not come directly from China according to researchers studying the outbreak in New York.
University researchers examining different groups of people in New York have independently concluded that their outbreak was carried across the Atlantic from Europe and the first cases transmissions occurred at some point in mid-February.
From the New York Times:
“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.
The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
The idea that the "China virus" was an exclusively Chinese problem was an evidently dangerous idea because that's what led to Trump's porous travel ban.
The Trump White House banned travel to and from China that may have slowed or stopped the spread along the west coast of the United States, but treating the virus like an exclusively Chinese problem left the east coast vulnerable.
To some extent, I think it would be fair to say that racism has led to an increased number of if not most virus deaths in the United States. And I'm not just talking about the fact that a majority of those succumbing to the virus appear to be African American or Latino. The Trump regime basing their whole mitigation strategy around it being a "China virus" left a door open for it spread from other sources; mainly white sources. Travel to and from Europe was nearly the last thing to be banned.
I wouldn't argue that the Chinese government is blameless as they do appear to have covered up the full extent of their own outbreak, but that's no excuse for everyone else who had time to see it coming and prepare.
New York had nearly 160,000 confirmed cases as of 2 p.m. today and 799 died in the state in the last 24 hours, the highest daily toll yet.