Political correctness usually just seems silly or at worst a little crazy, but in the case of the Chinese-originated virus, the worldwide virtue signaling has become worse than dangerous; it has become deadly.
Dario Nardella, the mayor of Florence, Italy, made a bold and disastrous stand for “inclusion” on February 1, immediately following President Trump’s decision to stop all inbound flights from China. According to the Global Times, Nardella “initiated ‘hug a Chinese’ on Twitter on Feb 1, opposing anger toward China amid the #nCoV2019 outbreak, and calling for ‘Unity in this common battle!.”
The results were beyond tragic as Italy became synonymous with the spread of the virus, with health facilities in northern cities rapidly becoming overwhelmed. The politically correct embrace of Chinese travelers doomed the region. As a result, many of the cases that showed up in the United States were from people infected in Italy due to virus virtue-signaling.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ran with the politically correct, pro-China line with his absurd attempt to identify the Chinese virus as a “European virus.” This is akin to claiming that gunpowder or noodles originated in Italy rather than recognizing that Marco Polo brought them from China in the late 13th century. In Cuomo’s politically correct world, however, blaming Italy is far better than agreeing with President Trump who isolated China early, while Europe opened its borders to viral visitors.
Cuomo’s blame-shifting followed the tainted governor’s obscene decision on March 20 to issue a mandate that New York state nursing homes had to accept virus-infected patients. Everyone in America knew that keeping the virus out of our nation’s senior care system was critical as this population was most likely to die if infected with the virus. We watched in horror in February as deaths mounted in just one Washington state nursing home, and in early March, Cuomo insisted he was taking action in order to protect seniors by heeding the president’s call.
Instead, in what can only be called political correctness run wild, Cuomo signed death warrants for thousands of elderly New Yorkers by injecting the virus directly into where they lived.
In case you think this is hyperbole, the Kaiser Family Foundation notes that of the 14 states it has studied, fully half of all the COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing homes. One-half, and the media darling Cuomo forced officials in his state to let the virus loose in virtually every nursing home there.
Any questions why New York accounts for one-third of all the deaths from the virus in the United States?
Even more incredible, this insane policy is contained in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest stimulus bill, where the House Democrats now want to incentivize senior care facilities to accept virus-infected patients.
Given the spread of the politically correct idea to infuse COVID-19 patients into senior health facilities so as to not treat them as lepers, as well as the push to negate China’s culpability for the virus itself, it is clear that political correctness is the most dangerous part of the entire government response to the plague unleashed upon the world from Wuhan, China.