Washington Post: “Black people — many of them immigrants — make up less than 2 percent of Maine’s population but almost a quarter of its coronavirus cases”.
Or put another way, African refugees in Maine contract Kung Flu, all are given free medical care, but two die, and the Governor uses the occasion to denounce her constituents’ racism.
Two of the state’s 115 coronavirus deaths have been among black Mainers, who health officials said tend to be younger and less likely to exhibit symptoms of the virus’s disease, covid-19. But advocates for immigrants say many have been ill, and a state lawmaker warned that black residents in Maine and nationwide are facing the “twin pandemics” of systemic racism that hinders access to health care, and a virus that has disproportionately infected people of color.
The most recent state data show that at least 836 of more than 3,600 Mainers who have had the coronavirus are black. Maine does not collect data for immigrants, following federal guidelines, but officials said contact tracing showed that many of those affected are immigrants or their children. Latinos account for a smaller number of cases, about 145 infections.
Almost half the black people in Maine are immigrants, the highest share in the nation. Most are from African nations including Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Fatuma Hussein, a Somali refugee and community leader in Lewiston, a city of 36,000 about an hour’s drive from Westbrook, said advocates knew instantly that the fast-spreading coronavirus “would be a disaster” for immigrants — one reason they urged the state to ramp up efforts to prevent the virus’s spread. Many immigrants have large families with eight to 10 children packed into tenements in the state’s cities. They carpool to work and the grocery store, and some wrongly believed the virus would not affect them.
So: people who arrived here with already-compromised health from shit holes like Somalia are living in cramped quarters instead of the quarter-acre, single-family homes they are owed by the unwoke, rural hicks of Maine, tax-paying trailer-parkers who have probably never heard of the Portland Volvo Line, let alone Mogadishu. Not surprisingly, these refugees are catching the flu in disproportionate numbers, so Janet Mills, the governor of those rubes of Rumford, the lady anointed by their betters to supervise and guide their behavior, vows punishment and retribution for their sins:
Mills said she would meet with representatives of immigrant, racial and ethnic groups about the coronavirus and pledged to “work to reduce these inequities.”
“It is deeply disheartening, and, frankly, unacceptable to me that Maine is confronting such significant racial disparities,” Mills said in a statement, adding that the pandemic “has laid bare the deep-seated inequities and racism in our society that deserve our attention.”
The revolution may come too late to forestall November’s coronation of the Virtue Crew, but it will come.
