Fears of foreigners bringing infectious disease into the country. Enhanced border checkpoints. And the use of disinfectant spray to sanitize human beings. These aren’t notes from one of Donald Trump’s freewheeling press conferences. The United States’ troubled response to the coronavirus pandemic is such that the Mexican border city of Nogales, Sonora, has set up “sanitizing tunnels” to disinfect people leaving the US through Nogales, Arizona. On the Mexican side of two major border crossings, drivers coming from Arizona must exit their vehicles and step into an inflatable tunnel that sprays them with a cleansing solution. Videos posted to social media by the municipal government of Nogales, Sonora, show people rotate under the vapor, stretch their arms and lean over to allow the disinfectant to reach their entire bodies. In a press release, the Nogales government states that the cleansing solution is biodegradable and protects from “any virus or bacteria, including Covid-19” for up to 24 hours. It adds that the tunnels “reduce the chances that a foreign citizen or citizen of this city who presents symptoms of the disease will infect other people on the Mexican side”. The border city’s mayor has told Mexican news outlets that a majority of the people who have tested positive for Covid-19 in Nogales, Sonora, had recently returned from the US. The Mexican border city plans to install five sanitizing tunnels to disinfect people arriving through its two main ports of entry from Nogales, Arizona. A sanitizing tunnel is also stationed outside a hospital in Nogales, Sonora, where visitors must brush open or duck through clear plastic curtains to be washed with the disinfectant mist. News reports identify the cleansing solution as biozinc. On its Facebook page, the government of Nogales, Sonora, announced on 7 May that “this measure came in response to requests from Nogales citizens to avoid infections from Arizona, one of the states most affected by coronavirus in the American Union”. Arizona has more than 11,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and a death toll of over 500 people. The Navajo Nation in the north-eastern corner of the state has been hit especially hard and continues to reel from a per-capita infection rate surpassed only by New York and New Jersey. Sonora, Mexico, has just over 400 confirmed cases of coronavirus, including 32 in Nogales. But doctors in Mexico City have come forward in the recent days to warn that the true toll of the virus has been dramatically underreported by the federal government as many people treated for Covid-19 symptoms fail to receive coronavirus tests, even when they die.