A Republican official in Kansas this week said that his state has been spared the worst of the coronavirus pandemic so far because it doesn’t have as many Chinese people as other states and countries around the world.

The Kansas City Star reports that Marvin Rodriguez, the Republican Chairman of the Riley County Commissioners, said that Kansas’s problems with the virus would be much worse if it had a large number of Chinese immigrants like they have in Italy.

ADVERTISEMENT

“There’s a garment industry and a lot of Chinese,” Rodriguez said of Italy. “If we were like Italy, we’d have it already.”

Rodriguez also seemed to suggest that he believed China intentionally put out the virus.

“Well, they say it came out of China, and I’m not putting it past the Chinese government in communist China,” he said.

When asked by the Kansas City Star what he meant by that, he replied, “Normally, this kind of thing spreads slowly… I put two and two together. I’ve been around a long time, girl.”

According to NPR, Kansas so far has documented 34 cases of coronavirus, including one fatality.