AUSTIN, Texas (July 6, 2020) — The Center for Immigration Studies reports that some percentage of the Texas Covid-19 hospitalizations, likely a significant one, comes from an ongoing influx of seriously ill patients who caught the virus in Covid-exploding Mexico and are legally and illegally crossing the border to flee that country's completely overrun health system. Refusal to acknowledge this ground truth and to excavate the data necessary to inform the right policy choices presents a danger to life that is more real than any imagined political offense by stating that Mexico is a source.
Todd Bensman, the Center's senior national security fellow, writes, "Enough evidence is now on hand that severely ill patients are pouring over from Mexico and adding to the American counts of hospitalization and death, probably coinciding with regular community spread resulting from recent mass protests. What's needed now is acknowledgement that there are at least two merging streams, not to be conflated with one another."
Texas is experiencing similar crisis conditions as other borders states, but Texas is receiving very different media coverage. Covid-19 patients have been flooding through California and Arizona border ports of entry from Mexico (some illegally) – by the thousands – since at least mid-May as the virus struck our southern neighbor a month or two behind the United States. It was no coincidence that at the same time the Baja and Sonora state hospital systems were seizing up in worst-case scenarios of deadly convulsions. Texas media have entirely abdicated reporting on the Mexico origins of patients overloading border care facilities, or even referencing the earlier reports by fellow journalists at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Mexico's Tamaulipas state hospitals right across from the Texas ones are seizing up, in Matamoros, across from Brownsville; in Reynosa, across from McAllen; in Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo; and in Juarez, across from El Paso.
Bensman reports, "On Friday, a Border Patrol agent who works the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas told me his leadership had informed agents that more than 350 of their ranks had been pulled off the line in just that sector and placed in quarantine, including 120 confirmed agent cases."
Meanwhile, with almost every hospital along the Texas border chronically full of Covid patients, medical leaders are transporting them to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and probably to other cities now reporting that they, too, are filling up ICU beds, just as reported in California.
America needs to know the reason for the spread, so effective policies can be implemented. The Trump administration may need to revisit the March 20 emergency border closure and determine whether it should be quickly revised and toughened to better protect American hospital systems. Elected state and local leaders like Governor Abbott and mayors in Texas cities may not need to reinstitute lock-downs, especially if significant percentages of the cases turn out to be a largely imported problem.
The data needed resides with the admitting hospitals at the border and in the interior of the state and, for the CBP hospital transports, obviously with CBP. But none has been made public.
The US COVID-19 toll to hit 3 million cases as Texas health system nears collapse
6 July 2020
The United States will surpass 3 million cases of COVID-19 today, with over 133,000 deaths. It was exactly one month ago when this figure passed the 2-million mark, just after George Floyd’s murder and the massive international protests against police violence and state repression. Many states had set into motion their return-to-work policies, opening movie theaters, restaurants, night clubs, beaches, parks, pools, and salons.
Yet the coronavirus, as many health officials and epidemiologists had warned, was still very much present and the necessary infrastructure to contain and isolate the virus was woefully lacking, even nonexistent, despite the assurances provided by Democratic and Republican governors that everything was under control.
However, very soon in the month of June, local and state health officials began warning of a rise in new cases COVID-19 cases, predominately along the sunbelt where states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona were the first to open the doors and encourage people to return to normal routines. Besides perfunctory statements that things were under control and admonishing young people to wear their masks and maintain social distancing, no effort was made to intervene.
 People wait in line at a free COVID-19 testing site provided by United Memorial Medical Center, at the Mexican Consulate, in Houston. (Image Credit: AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
On June 7, the United States saw its lowest daily count since the pandemic hit in force, with 18,930 new cases. Yesterday’s three-day rolling average for the number of new cases per day was 52,439, a three-fold increase, though the daily number of deaths has been slowly declining, to just over 500, a fact that the Trump administration and its right-wing media apologists have seized on to dismiss the significance of the skyrocketing number of infections.
Several factors have been cited to account for this divergence. They include the time lag between new infections and deaths, a better understanding of the disease process with improvements in treatments, and the much lower median age of those infected in the June and July surges. Regardless, many health systems in the hardest-hit areas are finding they are at capacity and have been sounding the alarm to reinforce lockdowns to allow the health systems to recover.
Eight states posted more than 1,000 new cases, with Florida reporting a one-day high of 11,458 cases of COVID-19, having surpassed 200,000 cases (100,000 new cases in two weeks). Only two states, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, have what could be construed as slightly declining numbers. Thirty-eight states have increasing numbers of new cases.
Arizona added 3,536 new cases yesterday, pushing the total close to the 100,000 mark. With close to 800,000 tests performed, the rate for testing positive is close to 11 percent. Governor Doug Ducey was compelled to issue an executive order reclosing restaurants, clubs, and gyms while urging the public to stay home as much as possible and to wear masks at all times in public settings. According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, 91 percent of ICU beds and 85 percent of regular hospital beds are occupied, and the likelihood of running out of bed space in a few weeks is a possibility.
Mexican authorities, citing the pandemic surge in the state, have closed the US-Sonora border over the weekend to non-essential travel. Independence Day would have brought many Arizonians to the beach towns of Rocky Point and San Carlos. The cases of COVID-19 in Sonora, Mexico, have reached an official count of 9,000, and hospitals in Nogales and Guaymas are reportedly at capacity.
By all accounts, Governor Greg Abbott’s complete indifference to the dangers posed by the coronavirus has led to the disastrous situation where conditions at the hospitals in Houston are now being compared to those in New York City at the height of its battle against the brutal outbreak.The situation has grown most dire in Texas as the health infrastructure has been pushed beyond capacity. Texas has also surpassed 200,000 cases of COVID-19, adding almost 50,000 cases in one week. The cumulative death toll stands at 2,662, placing the crude case fatality rate at around 1.3 percent. On Saturday, Texas reported 7,890 hospitalized for coronavirus.
According to public health experts, such as Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the crisis in Texas could have been avoided had local health officials been given the authority to manage the outbreak. Only late last week did the governor issue a mandate to wear masks in public and other basic mitigation practices. Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University and the Baylor College of Medicine, told the Houston Chronicle, “We’re on the verge of a nightmarish catastrophe. On May 1, I thought we actually had a chance to get this virus under control and get the economy opened up safely. I’m not sure we can get it under control anymore.”
Placing the governor’s actions into context, by the end of April, approximately 2 million Texans were given a pink slip, and oil prices had plummeted to historic lows. Many hard-line conservatives were clamoring to open businesses. Despite public assurance to adhering to guidance from the public health sectors and use data-driven processes, all such measures were quickly abandoned. Any attempt by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo to enforce fundamental “mask orders” was condemned by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and US Representative Dan Crenshaw, arguing she was exaggerating the dangers of the virus.
Manny Vela, a CEO of Valley Baptist Health System, one of the hospital systems in the Rio Grande Valley, said, “we are now at the point of grave concerns” as local hospitals have started diverting patients from overcrowded emergency rooms. According to the Texas Tribune, 10 of 12 hospitals in Hidalgo, Cameron, and Starr counties are at capacity. They are on patient bypass, meaning they are no longer accepting patients at their hospitals. According to Hidalgo county spokesperson Carlos Sanchez, the number of people hospitalized has tripled in the last two weeks.
According to Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, speaking with the Wall Street Journal, “We’re on a trajectory right now that we could be inundating our intensive-care units here within the next week to ten days. We’re watching the numbers daily. We may have to take more drastic action.”
In Houston, physicians have to make difficult decisions on who to admit for care. Improvisation is in order as hospitals scramble to accommodate and treat more patients. Staffing is stretched thin, making other functions the hospital performs—elective cases, a sundry of medical services, laboratory testing—backlogged, and extremely limited.
Methodist Hospital, one of the highest-ranked hospitals in the region, had almost 400 COVID-19 patients a week ago Sunday. In a few days, the number climbed to over 600 despite conservative admission criteria and rapid discharges. By the weekend, despite adding 130 inpatient beds, hospital administrators are estimating the system could reach 800 or 900 soon. This has become a typical situation for the hospital systems in Harris County, where Houston is located.
Speaking to the New York Times, Dr. Mir M. Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said, “What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one.”
Within the Republican Party, ultra-right elements have attacked Governor Abbott, not for bungling the response to COVID-19 and helping cause the public health disaster, but for going too far in restricting business activities. The Ector County Republican Party voted over the weekend to censure Abbott over his handling of the pandemic, accusing him of “overstepping his authority in responding to the coronavirus” and “violating five party principles related to his exercise of executive power during the pandemic.”
At the same time, President Trump continued to dismiss the seriousness of the pandemic, downplaying the rise in cases as the result of “too much testing” and claiming that “99 percent of cases are totally harmless.” There is method in this apparent madness, since the only effective action to be taken in response to the soaring infection rates would be a return to statewide lockdowns, which would tank the stock markets and cause the Dow Jones average to plummet—his sole guiding star.
Over 300 children catch COVID-19
in Texas daycares
6 July 2020
Over 900 cases of COVID-19 have been reported at daycare centers in the state of Texas in the last month and a half. At least 307 children and 643 staff members have tested positive for the deadly disease in the state’s childcare facilities since their reopening in mid-May.
According to the Texas Tribune, as of last Tuesday over 950 cases of the deadly disease were reported at 668 different centers throughout the state. According to Dr. Nicholas Rister, a pediatric infectious diseases expert in Ft. Worth, the cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Texas daycares have skyrocketed in the months since the state has dropped all measures to curb the spread of the virus.
“Based on just the number of children that are testing positive in our area, it has more than doubled in the past couple of weeks,” Rister told the local CBS affiliate in the city last week.
On July 4, the Texas Department of State Health reported 191,790 cases of COVID-19, with an additional 2,608 deaths. Texas currently has the third-highest number of COVID-19 cases, behind New York state and California.
“These numbers are definitely alarming,” states the parenting website Moms.com of the outbreaks in Texas daycares. “We should ask ourselves if these children are recovering as they would from the cold or flu, or if they are gravely suffering,” the website adds, noting, “[b]ased on this happening only in June, it makes parents question what’s to happen with the school year in the fall.”
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) gave an official recommendation for school systems. “All policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” the AAP insisted. Disregarding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations, the AAP told school administrators, “the relative impact of physical distancing among children is likely small based on current evidence and certainly difficult to implement.”
In fact, hundreds of cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome have been detected across the United States and in Europe, a disease in children linked to exposure to the SARS-COV-2 virus. In addition, the transmission of the virus from children to the rest of the community is far more likely to occur as schools and daycares begin to reopen.
Nor are children immune from the worst effects of the novel coronavirus. An 11-year-old Florida boy with preexisting health conditions died last week after contracting COVID-19, making him the youngest person to die from the disease in the state.
“Schools were designed for efficiency, which means crowded hallways and tight classrooms,” New Jersey educator Mark Weber explained in a comment published in the Washington Post. “Schools are expected to foster student and teacher interactions, which means close quarters. Expecting every student and staff member to maintain a three-foot [bubble] around themselves is not realistic given the way most school buildings are laid out,” the teacher writes.
Schools have been under immense pressure to resume activities as states have sought to implement the march back to work. A study conducted in Germany estimates that 8.4 percent of Europe’s economic output will evaporate if school and childcare facilities do not open. Studies of the US economy produced similar findings.
“If schools don’t open, a lot of people can’t go back to work,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in a comment for the Washington Post. According to the Post, nearly a third of all US workers have children under the age of 18. “Even parents who can work from home are struggling to produce the same amount of work while balancing child care,” the Post notes.
The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute estimates 17.5 million workers in the United States will not be able to return to full-time jobs without places to watch their children throughout the day.
Childcare has been decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a recent study by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), as many as half of the US’s childcare facilities may be closed permanently before the end of the pandemic. At least 258,000 childcare workers, or 25 percent of the total, have been laid off since March.
This crisis has hit larger corporate chains as well as small independently run facilities. “The child-care industry is going through a gut-wrenching challenge right now,” Kindercare Learning Centers CEO Tom Wyatt told the Post. The CEO stated that because of class size restrictions allowing only 10 children per room, the corporation was not earning money. “Obviously, that is not sustainable,” he declared.
Lobbyists for the industry have sought additional funds from the US government to assist them in bearing the cost of the prolonged drop in business. Congress allocated just $3.5 billion in aid to childcare providers to defray losses.
Last week, the Democratic majority House of Representatives passed the Moving Forward Act, an infrastructure bill that would allot $10 billion to childcare facilities to help them enable good social distancing measures. However, the bill has already been declared “dead on arrival” in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The rush to reopen schools is drawing immense resistance from school workers. According to a joint USA Today/Ipsos survey released in May, one in five teachers say they will not go back if ordered into classrooms in the fall. “They don’t supply hand sanitizer. They don’t supply wipes. None of these supplies were ever given to us. You just used what you had or what teachers themselves purchased,” Robin Stauffer, an elementary school teacher in Texas explained to Houston Public Media. Stauffer, who is 66 with diabetes, was speaking about conditions at her job prior to the pandemic.
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