Just how prominent of a role has Mexico’s viral peak played in the resurgence of the more serious cases in our country? Hidalgo County, Texas, one of the most heavily trafficked border-crossing counties, recorded 31 deaths Tuesday, more than the daily total in all but six states.

Over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly clear that the highest concentration of deaths in this generally milder wave of the virus is coming from the border. [You can read the series here, here, here, here, and here.] Every day, the stark contrast in data from border counties becomes increasingly too obvious to ignore.

It’s truly shocking to see a county like Hidalgo rack up 31 reported deaths in one day. To put this in perspective, all but six entire states recorded fewer deaths Tuesday. The exceptions were California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Alabama, and North Carolina.

Special thanks to @JTUGS! Since June 1st confirmed cases per 1k residents. Hidalgo County has grown 1300%. Harris County 285%. @RMConservative @NahasNewman

— wyatt (@wyattsheepie) July 15, 2020

Hidalgo County’s death toll, given its population size and density relative to Texas’s big cities, defies the trend in every non-border state where we see the larger and denser counties rack up exponentially more deaths. Even before Tuesday’s record deaths in Hidalgo, the county had nearly twice as many deaths from the preceding six days as Harris and Dallas counties! Harris County, which includes Houston, is roughly three times more populous and is five times more densely populated than Hidalgo.

Perhaps there is something genetically unique about this border county? Not at all. If that were the case, we’d have seen the trend of Hidalgo eclipsing Texas’s population centers from day one. In fact, Hidalgo County recorded just 23 virus deaths from the beginning of March through June 23, a fraction of the deaths in Dallas and Houston up until that point. In other words, the dynamic in Texas tracked closely with that of other states where most of the deaths were in the major cities, not in outlier counties like Hidalgo.

It certainly wasn’t the reopening of Texas on May 1 that caused the surge in Hidalgo. Their deaths actually went down to near zero from mid-May to mid-June – right during the window you would typically see those deaths occur, had the reopening played a role. . .

The obvious culprit is the cross-border traffic both from travelers, citizens, and illegal aliens. The surge in deaths beginning in late June coincides with the peaking of deaths in Mexico, particularly in Tamaulipas, right during the beginning of June, which perfectly jives with the 21-day average infection-to-death duration.

What changed right around June? While border apprehensions by Border Patrol were down during March and April because of the new turnback policies against illegal aliens, the numbers surged again in June, coinciding with Mexicans getting sick from the virus. Border apprehensions increased by 40% during June, almost exclusively driven by single adults. Even before the new policy changes, we were not offering liberal immigration accommodations to single adults. So why would they be incentivized to come? Could it be that many of them were coming for care and were fleeing the disastrous hospitals in Mexico?

The trend and timing of increased border apprehensions by border sector is even more remarkable. The virus seems to have come to western Mexico first in Baja California (south of California), then migrated east to Sonora (south of Arizona) in May and then to Tamaulipas (south of Texas) in June. Apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley were up 47% over May! All the news reports [Washington Post, Reuters, and Kaiser Health News] of Mexican nationals coming for treatment in California were already being reported in May – long before the spike in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that didn’t begin to materialize until a few weeks ago. Those numbers coincide perfectly with the increase in border crossings by sector.

Border apprehensions in the two California border sectors – San Diego and El Centro – increased from April to May 46% and 49% respectively. That is when those areas got slammed with cross border cases of COVID-19. They have continued to increase in June but by a smaller margin. The CBP border numbers are for illegal aliens, but they likely reflect the desperation in that part of Mexico as the virus hit, which we observed in green card holders and dual citizens who came for treatment.

The same dynamic played out in the Yuma, Arizona, sector. While the raw number of border apprehensions is much lower in this sector, the percentage increase from April to May was a whopping 150%. In June, the rate of increase slowed down to 30%. Which makes sense because we are now seeing the deaths in Southern California and Arizona level off.

This was all occurring before we saw any deaths in the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas. In contrast to the other sectors, the RGV increased by just 9% from April to May, but then by 47% from May to June. And as always, they had the most raw number of apprehensions of any border sector.

The timing of this data shift coinciding with the spike in deaths rising along the border from west to east in May and then June demonstrates a remarkable connection between what is going on in Mexico and how it’s driving the coronavirus spike on our side of the border.

Once again, the disproportionate number of deaths cannot be blamed on these counties being majority Latino, who seem to have an increased risk of death. Dona Anna County, New Mexico, which is 70 percent Latino, has had only 11 deaths. As I noted in the last article of this series, the difference is that New Mexico gets almost no illegal immigration and no legal border crossings because there is almost no civilization on the Mexico side of that border. Yuma County, Arizona, on the other hand, has 159 deaths, even though it’s roughly the same size and of the same demographic composition as Dona Anna.

The ensuring lesson? As goes Mexico, so goes America’s border counties. (For more from the author of “One Texas-Mexico Border County Reported More Deaths Tuesday Than 44 States” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

There is no vaccine, effective treatment, or herd immunity for the virus of panic and fear sown by the media that is propagated straight to people’s brains from their smartphones. And unlike with coronavirus, the young are more seriously afflicted with this intractable disease than seniors, according to a new study.

Four researchers published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research studying people’s perceived personal health risks associated with COVID-19. The most striking result of their survey of 1,500 Americans from May 6 to May 13 is that the younger the age of the respondent, the more the individual seemed concerned about the virus being deadly to them – the exact inverse of the true threat assessment of the virus.

It’s reflective of a generation that is inundated with Apple, Google, and Yahoo’s sensational news headlines on their phones and, unlike their parents and grandparents, have no minds of their own to decipher the information and interpret it with the proper context.

When asked by the four researchers, who hail from Harvard, Oxford, and Università Bocconi, out of “1,000 people very similar to you” how many would die from COVID-19 over the next nine weeks, the median estimated guess by respondents aged 18-34 was 20, or 2%. In other words, the average Millennial thought that 2% of everyone like them would die within nine weeks from the virus. In contrast, in contrast, the respondents aged 70 years or older, which is exponentially more at risk, asses their risk of dying at about 1%.

What is the infection fatality rate (IFR) for younger people? The CDC estimates a 0.05% IFR for everyone in the age cohort of 0-49. Other estimates based on Spain serology tests broken down by age suggest an even lower IFR for those 18-49.

But that is only the risk once someone contracts the virus. When you couple the chance of not getting the virus together with the chance of not dying from it once infected, the rate is even lower. Four infectious disease doctors in Canada estimate that the individual rate of death from COVID-19 for people under 65 years of age in Canada is six per million people, or 0.0006% – 1 in 166,666, which is “roughly equivalent to the risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident during the same time period.” Those numbers are even lower for people under 35. In other words, the respondents in this study overestimated their risk of dying by at least a factor of 3,000.

According to the CDC, the IFR for those over 65 is 1.3%, although it is heavily skewed by nursing home deaths in the numerator. For seniors in better health, the numbers are much lower. Thus, the senior respondents in the survey are much closer to reality in their thinking.

According to the CDC, there have been 944 COVID-19 deaths among those aged 15-34. And that is with a liberal definition of a COVID death that has included young people who died of alcohol poisoning, gunshots, and drug overdoses, which, incidentally, are increasing because of the panic and social isolation, which in itself is exponentially disproportionate to the threat of the virus itself.

Now consider the top causes of death for youngsters, courtesy of a table published by Avik Roy last month. In 2016, there were 37,879 deaths by unintentional injury among those 18-34, which obviously is very much influenced by car accidents. That is 40 times the number of deaths from the virus. There were 10,548 deaths by homicide, more than 11 times greater than from the virus.

How many Millennials do you know who think twice before getting into a car or engaging in a fun-seeking activity that could result in injury or death? And remember, while accidents are more likely to occur among reckless people, they can and do end lives of all people. The few virus deaths for those under 35, on the other hand, are almost all among those with specific serious heart conditions or comorbidities.

The answer is very simple. People’s phones are not blowing up with news of people dying in car crashes every second. Smartphones and the information that pings their users are like the Bible for this generation of American youth. The same source of their anxiety over catching the virus is the same source that made them temporarily suspend that anxiety to protest in the streets in large crowds. They are the same people who believe black youth are more likely to be killed by police than by gang members. For Millennials, the media is like a game of Simon Says. It’s an amazing contrast from the youth of the 1960s who wore T-shirts saying, “Question authority.”

This disproportionate degree of panic and fear sown by herd mentality and magnified by technology is not cost-free. When you have young people thinking their risk of dying is thousands of times greater than the actual threat, they can resort to extreme behavior that is more dangerous than the virus. Perhaps this is why drug overdoses are spiking in some states.

This point was driven home in a paper co-authored by D.A. Henderson, the former dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who is widely credited with helping to eradicate smallpox. In that 2006 publication from Johns Hopkins, Henderson and three other authors note that lockdowns would produce so many negative effects that “this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”

Perhaps the most destructive element of lockdown is the panic and fear that such severe measures help confirm, in this case, wrongly so, in the minds of the young and impressionable. As the paper concludes, “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”

In other words, we need to flatten the fear. (For more from the author of “New Study: Millennials Think Their Risk From COVID-19 Is Exponentially More Than the True Threat” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE