How bad is it here? Nueces County’s in the news. So is Hidalgo County and so is Cameron County, if you’ve been keeping up with the Texas Tribune, or MSNBC’s coverage (Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes/Ali Velshi, Lawrence O’Donnell just this week) or if you’ve listened to Chris Cuomo lately.
Amarillo’s worried about their hospital capacity, but yesterday they received a COVID 19 patient flown up from South Texas, where there are zero ICU beds — had to find a fixed-wing air ambulance for the patient, because that’s too far for a helicopter to bring somebody to the hospital.
I found out about it reading this:
Here in Lubbock we’re not at ICU/hospital 100% capacity, yet. There are 184 ICU beds in the city, with 47 Covid patients currently hospitalized in them, per the City of Lubbock’s Department of Health. Out of more than 1325 beds there are 66 in use for COVID today.
But this is the shape we’re in as of 6:30 pm local time today: (Press release from the City of Lubbock)
LUBBOCK, Texas (Press Release)
As of 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 22, 2020, the City of Lubbock confirmed 113 new cases of Coronavirus (COVID-19), 85 recoveries and one additional death. The total number of cases in Lubbock County is 4,769: 2,233 active, 2,468 listed as recovered and 68 deaths.
The City wants to remind citizens to follow Governor Greg Abbott’s latest executive order which prohibits gatherings of 10 or more people, within the city limits, unless approval from the Mayor is received. That order can be found at www.mylubbock.us/COVID19
To request approval from the Mayor for outdoor events with anticipated gatherings of 10 or more people, visit www.mylubbock.us/lubbocksafe where you will find an approval checklist. Completed checklists should be submitted to lubbocksafe@mylubbock.us a minimum of ten days prior to the event for approval.
Let’s put this into perspective real fast: I’m on the South Plains, right square in the middle: Lubbock is home to the Panhandle/South Plains fairgrounds, and these are the 24 counties in the region, as wikipedia defines us: Bailey, Borden, Brisco, Castro, Cochran, Crosby, Dawson, Dickens, Floyd, Gaines, Garza, Hale, Hockley, Kent, King, Lamb, Lubbock, Lynn, Motley, Parmer, Scurry, Swisher, Terry, and Yoakum. Brisco, Castro, Parmer and Swisher are also part of the Texas Panhandle region.
There’s one other semi-urban county in our region — Hale, due north of us, where Plainview is the county seat. I used to live an hour and a half southwest of here, down in Yoakum County on the northeast corner of the Permian Basin, which at the time was the biggest landlocked oilpatch in the US. We’re a couple hours from Oklahoma; we’re an hour, tops, from New Mexico.
We’re in the part of Texas where there are lots more miles of open farm and ranchlands than there are urban areas. A handful of counties in the South Plains — Borden and King most notably — currently are not reporting any COVID cases. Most of those counties with single numbers are similar: lots of wide open land, a few ranch or farm houses scattered out; King county’s whole population is fewer than 1,000 persons. It’s one of several counties in this part of Texas where the only full-time medical provider in the county is a veterinarian — they don’t even have a school nurse.
But we’re seeing the cases go through the roof here, too.
We’re south of most of the meatpacking plants (they’d report to Amarillo, being north of there), and the big packing plants and feedyards case numbers may have peaked. (There’s a town called Cactus in the Panhandle that IS a packing plant, essentially; the workers’ houses surround a K-6 school. There’s a church, and there used to be one bar — but that was in the 1990s, before the big 2007 tornado. When I worked for the Census up there, you’d see Chihuahuan license plates ofterner than Texas ones. )
They may not have; I don’t follow the Amarillo news very closely. Here’s what they released for today:
but that’s not the point I wanted to make. The point I wanted to make is that people are having to travel close to 700 miles for an ICU bed in parts of Texas.
Ambulances from San Angelo are in Harlingen. Ambulances in McAllen and Harlingen are having to wait in line, often for hours, to deliver patients to the ER — and the ER is stacking patients up in recliner chairs, with makeshift curtains dividing them, because the ICUs are full, the floors are full, the ERs are full, and people keep coming in needing help.
This thing isn’t over.
Not by a long shot.
Trump and Abbott think they’re going to get schools back in regular operation in three weeks?
They better think again.
Nothing’s going to be back to regular operations in three weeks.