Category: US Politics

Chinese state media on Thursday heralded the advent of a new, and supposedly more accurate, method of testing for the Chinese coronavirus that involves swabbing the subject’s anus.

Beijing residents subjected to the new testing procedure described it as “awkward” and a bit of an unpleasant surprise.

“You take off your pants, lie on the bed, and then you feel the cotton swabs inserted into your anus twice and turned a few times, which takes about 10 seconds each time,” one of the test subjects explained, as state media outlet Global Times quoted them.
Some of the test subjects were considerably less relaxed about the procedure:

An internet user on Xiaohongshu, a social media platform, said that she had a “mental meltdown” when she was informed she had to take anal swabs along with other methods including nasal swabs, throat swabs, blood draws, and saliva tests, after she returned from overseas and was quarantined for 28 days. 

Another said, “When you bend over with your pants off, and medical staff poke your anus repeatedly, all you can feel is a sense of shame, but other than that, it was not that uncomfortable.” 

Given the unpleasant experience when taking such tests, some netizens have asked whether it is necessary to adopt the method on top of the current ones, which have proved effective. 

Chinese doctors the Global Times quoted said yes, it is necessary to embrace the new testing method because they have determined the Wuhan coronavirus “lives longer in the anus or excrement than in upper body tracts,” especially when dealing with asymptomatic carriers. They are also worried about coronavirus clusters that could live in the anal region and emerge through contaminated defection, which might remain contagious after leaving the body.

Up until this point, there has been no evidence of coronavirus transmission from the gastrointestinal tract. However, some studies have suggested that in patients who develop COVID pneumonia, the presence of COVID RNA in anal swabs may be an indicator of disease severity (i.e. increased likelihood of ICU admission).

Doctors said the new anal tests would only be performed on “key groups at quarantine centers.” Staff and students at a school in Beijing were treated to the new anal tests last week, in addition to older nasal, throat, and serum antibody tests, after a nine-year-old boy tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus.

Another Global Times article quoted some experts who disapprove of the anal tests, noting there is no evidence of transmission through the digestive system and excrement yet, so nasal and throat swabs are still “more efficient.”

“Beijing will also conduct serum antibody tests for all inbound overseas travelers who have entered the Chinese capital city since December 10 in an effort to find the chain of transmission in the latest cluster infections in the capital’s Daxing district,” the article reported.

Forbes noted that “there does not appear to be a coordinated policy” for using anal swabs, so the test came as a “surprise” to some patients. Al Jazeera News speculated the new test would be used more frequently as China’s travel-heavy Lunar New Year holiday approaches.

Al Jazeera noted a mixture of “mirth and horror” in reactions to the new tests on Chinese social media, including one commenter who described the test as “low harm but extreme humiliation.”

Many migrants are quietly traveling north to the U.S. border to accept President Joe Biden’s apparent offer of asylum and jobs, according to the New York Times. 

“He’s our only hope,” Gabriela, a Bolivian mother with a three-year-old son, told the newspaper, which reported January 28:

With [disease] lockdowns easing in recent months, northbound migration from Central America and elsewhere has been accelerating, with many trying to make it to the United States border and some hoping that with Mr. Biden in office, they stand a better chance of getting in.

An enormous caravan of migrants, numbering as many as 7,000, that set off from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, earlier this month before being broken up by Guatemalan security forces was the most obvious expression of this need and hope. But the uptick is also being felt in smaller ways, including growing numbers of migrants filling shelters along the traditional migratory routes.

“The people aren’t going to be stopped by repression,” said Father Mauro Verzeletti, director of the Casa del Migrante migrant shelter in Guatemala City. “The people are suffering.” Demand is so high, Mr. Verzeletti said, that the shelter recently rented an annex to handle overflow from the main building.

The headline reads, “Biden’s Promise of Immigration Reform Raises Hopes in Latin America.”

The New York Times suggests the migration problem was created by Trump’s broad effort to block labor migration:

The impatience is a reflection of the soaring demand for relief among migrants amid an economically crippling pandemic and after four years of efforts by the Trump administration to choke off both legal and illegal immigration to the United States.

But the problem has a bipartisan, establishment source — the willingness of many GOP politicians to look away while employers illegally hire cheap illegals instead of Americans, and the eagerness of progressives to believe that foreign migrants can be helped without damaging poor Americans.

The result is that the United States government is refusing to enforce its own laws and is instead dangling jobs and good lives to many of the migrants who enter and survive the continental “Hunger Games” trek from thousands of miles south of the United States, through a de facto obstacle course migration system of loans, coyotes, cartels, rape, deserts, weather, border laws, barriers, rescuers, transport, judges, and cheap-labor employers.

Progressives and immigration lawyers blame others — chiefly, ordinary Americans who oppose labor migration — for the resulting multinational economic chaos, misery, and death:

But there is some good news in other media reports.

Trump’s border reforms eventually helped close the Hunger Games obstacle course and so persuaded many poor people to seek relief closer to their homes. “More people are no longer thinking of going to the US,”  Rosario Martinez, a Guatemalan researcher with the Latin American Social Studies Institute, told Al Jazeera on January 26. “What used to be transit countries are now becoming destination countries for many.”

Also, the Mexican and Guatemalan governments may choose to block migration to the United States in the hope that the many Mexican and Guatemalan illegal migrants in the United States will benefit from Biden’s proposed amnesty. If so, the progressives in Biden’s government can minimize their political risks by dumping the unwanted job of blocking Latino migrants onto Latino soldiers and police.

The Christian Science Monitor reported January 26:

Gretchen Kuhner, the director of the Institute for Women in Migration in Mexico City, says Mexico has national interests of its own in keeping levels of migration down …

“Mexico knows very well that if there’s a surge on the [U.S.] border, the political right in the U.S. will make a huge issue of it, and that could impact the legislative proposals for immigration,” says Ms. Kuhner. “That plays into Mexico’s approach.”

 Guatemala may be thinking along similar lines: Remittances sent home to Guatemala by relatives in the U.S. reached record levels during the pandemic, surpassing $1 billion a month by the end of 2020. That’s a lifeline few Guatemalan officials want to jeopardize.

However, that division of labor is uncertain because amnesty alone is very unpopular – as is labor migration — among voters in the United States.

Also, Biden is also using his executive orders to reopen the flow of cheap workers and government-aided consumers into the United States, making it more difficult for Latin-American governments to block migrants.

Biden’s officials recognize and resent the public’s opposition to their loose-border migration preferences.

“Any transition away from what I see as highly draconian policies on the U.S. side, I think will probably have to be done slowly to unwind them, because otherwise, there is a tendency to see this rush to the border, which unfortunately, again, will kick up [American] backlash,” complained Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s top “southern border coordinator” at the White House. Jacobsen spoke June 2020 at a conversation hosted by the pro-migration Migration Policy Institute.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers — into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory.

The opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of innovative American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.

Understandably, poor migrants ignore macroeconomics as they hope to work in the United States. “We only want to work,” José Luis Rodríguez Romero, told the New York Times. He was at a shelter in Guatemala City with his wife and three children.

“This [Biden] government will help us. That’s what we hope for.”