When Brittany Bankhead-Kendall received the Covid-19 vaccine in a beautiful executive room at the University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, the little stroke finally gave her a measure of hope that she and her family would be safe.
But she still knew that down there the patients fought for their lives and died every day, relying on surgical tubes and ventilators just to breathe.
“It’s a great juxtaposition and it’s a really precarious situation to have so much hope and so much headache, sort of, all on the same walls,” said Bankhead-Kendall, a trauma surgeon and ICU doctor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
A year after the pandemic began, more than 13,500 patients with Covid-19 languish in hospitals across Texas. With only 586 ICU beds in the entire state and some regions already running out of space, “hospitals can’t take much more”, says the State Department of Health Services (DSHS) recently tweeted.
However, Covid is still furious: about one in six molecular tests in Texas is positive now, well above the 10% limit of Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, who was once seen as a “warning flag” ”For wide dissemination in the community.
“The Covid-19 pandemic is at its worst in Texas,” DSHS wrote online earlier this month, and “probably has never been easier to pick up”.
In a perfect world, Bankhead-Kendall said, Texas would take a page from other states, where leaders strategically used economic downtime to give health professionals a break.
“If you are not going to stay in our hospitals, helping to care for our patients, then you can at least be outside our walls and do your part to back off in other ways,” she said.
But Abbott categorically rejected another blockade, a successful but blunt instrument that would undoubtedly cause him political suffering. And although he has instituted reductions in business occupation and closing bars in regions with high hospitalizations, these restrictions have been shown to be incomplete and, for the most part, ineffective.
In fact, in addition to advocating therapeutic treatments and bragging about the launch of the vaccine in the state, Abbott’s administration has made very little effort to mitigate the carnage of the virus in recent months, even when a new highly contagious variant threatens even greater devastation.
“Republican politicians are acting like business as usual,” said Abhi Rahman, communications director for the Texas Democratic Party. “They are acting as if the pandemic never existed.”
Last March, Dan Patrick, Texas’s vice governor, sparked a widespread reaction when he advocated a quick reopening, hinting that the country’s elderly were willing to put their lives at risk to save the US economy. But despite the hasty Texas emergency of the blockade in May, its struggling workforce has failed to recover, with the unemployment rate still persisting at 7.2% in December, compared with 3.5% the previous year.
Instead, Texas’s non-intervention approach recovered the virus, killing more than 33,700 Texans, leaving orphaned children and forcing doctors to make painful decisions about rationing care. Now, after months of suffering, the pandemic has hit another hellish chapter, with hundreds of deaths daily.
“The elections have consequences and this is the direct result of the Republican leadership,” said Rahman.
In Fort Worth, criminal justice organizer Pamela Young declined the city’s invitation to huddle in a room for seven hours of face-to-face interview panels with top candidates for chief of police in January.
After witnessing almost constant and notorious cases of police brutality in Fort Worth, she knows how important the police chief’s job is. Then she asked the city deputy manager if he could facilitate a virtual option for the panels, similar to the remote meetings that other local officials have held.
But the city insisted on face-to-face interviews, apparently ambivalent to the fact that they were forcing Young to put her life on the line or to be excluded from high-risk talks about an issue she had been advocating for years.
“It is frightening to think that our municipal government and team leadership – whatever it is – have so much contempt for human life in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Young.
Other cities and counties in Texas – especially urban centers that tend more to Democrats – have moved away from the state’s example and have tried to implement policies to reduce infections at the local level. But since last summer, Abbott and his colleagues have undermined the authority of other officials, sabotaging attempts to save lives in hard-hit communities.
“The state is driving the car,” explained Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. “We are passengers.”
In December, Abbott – supported by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – went so far as to encourage businesses in Austin to stop the local curfew and announce the new year late at night.
Encouraged crowds gathered outside the open bars. Inside, partygoers danced and hugged while the bartenders went without a mask, a deadly recipe for the outbreak that health experts warned would happen if Americans didn’t stay home while on vacation.
Meanwhile, Bankhead-Kendall observed patients who survived even mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 cases deal with collapsing lungs or blood clots, probably because of the virus.
Since the introduction of a vaccine, the general public in Texas has been relaxed, she said, “feeling like it’s almost over.” But so far, only about 5% of the state’s 29 million or so residents have received at least the first dose, and overall availability is presumably still months away.
“They don’t understand the immediate or potential long-term consequences or sequelae of the disease,” said Bankhead-Kendall.
“Most people live, and that’s where a lot of people hang their hats.”