During a virtual town hall on Tuesday, embattled Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) blamed “the Hispanic population” for the steady rise of COVID-19 infections in his home state and even suggested the idea of sending cops to convenience stores and grocery stores to issue citations for not wearing masks.
“And I will tell you, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we’ve had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44% of the cases — the positive cases,” the Republican senator said, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by the Daily Boulder. “And we do have concerns that, in the Hispanic population, we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”
“I know that it’s an inconvenience, but it’s a minor inconvenience when you think about the fact that you may be infecting somebody, or you yourself might have an underlying health condition that could make it an acute case that ultimately leads to death,” the senator continued.
“I don’t know if we’d ever have enough police officers to go into every convenience store, grocery store and cite people for doing it, but I really hope we don’t have to go to that point,” he added.
As of Wednesday, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported 91,266 positive cases of COVID-19, including 1,142 people current hospitalizations.
While a disproportionate amount of North Carolina’s COVID-19 cases have been reported in its community, it is also true of many areas across the country with pockets of high Latinx populations, who are often employed as “essential workers” in jobs which demand sharing tight quarters with other employees, such as construction sites or factories.
A number of economic and sociological conditions contribute to this imbalance, which appears in communities of color across the country. However, Tillis’ anecdotal evidence of a racial divide in proper preventive steps would appear to be off-base, if not backwards.
You can listen to Tillis’ remarks shared by American Bridge, below:
