My only update, sadly, is that rather than 390 fatalities from April 16 when this piece was published, we're now up to 495. The difference in the number of cases reported is 3,458, way up from 16,000, nearly a week ago, resulting in 19,458 today.
And this increase and these figures are without most people getting tested, which shows just how quickly this virus is spreading.
Texans would do well, if they can, to simply not fall prey to the "stubborn if expediently applied strain of anti-government independence" that characterizes Texas that lurks behind the decision to open up Texas sometime soon.
-Angela Valenzuela
My faith in their ability to fix this mess is lower than the water levels in West Texas creek beds in August.
By Mimi Swartz
Contributing Opinion Writer
· April 16, 2020
HOUSTON — Usually, I think the eternal optimism I inherited from my father is a blessing, especially now, when faced with many more weeks under pandemic house arrest. The memory of Dad’s perpetual hopefulness has helped me to remind myself that this, too, will pass, and that maybe we as a society will emerge stronger and wiser.
Then I remember where I am: in Texas, where our Republican elected officials are supposed to be getting us through this epic nightmare. I’m not singling out one political party over another, but the Republicans do have a stranglehold on state government here. To paraphrase an old saying, they bought it, they broke it, and my faith in their ability to fix it — “it” being not just recovery from a public health disaster but also from the economic fallout that will follow — is lower than the water levels in West Texas creek beds in August.
Where to start? Topping the list has to be our governor, Greg Abbott, who was so slow to accept that there was such a thing as the coronavirus that Texas ranks near the bottom in a WalletHub report on pandemic responsiveness by states. It was a cool jujitsu move, the way a governor who has spent most of his term trying to take power away from urban centers has suddenly become so magnanimous about letting Democratic mayors and county officials handle this crisis. Mr. Abbott also thinks it’s just fine to let people mingle at church out in the country, even though the absence of health care in rural Texas is well known.
He has his priorities. Mr. Abbott and our state attorney general, Ken Paxton, wasted no time protecting the unborn by trying to close abortion clinics during the pandemic while showing far less concern for full grown, desperately ill adults. (Abortion rights groups have taken them to court and won — so far.)
It was a Democrat, Judge Clay Jenkins of Dallas County, who was among the first Texas officials to institute a shelter-in-place order, on March 23. Meanwhile, his Republican counterpart a few miles down the road in Tarrant County, Glen Whitley, refused to close down businesses, claiming: “This is not a deadly disease. Yes, there are folks dying, but I’m just not going to do it.” He finally relented near the end of that month.
Most of you probably heard the eloquent and altruistic words of our lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, the former TV broadcaster and talk show host who used to toot horns, ring cowbells and wear crazy hats until he got elected to the legislature and transformed himself into a pious and zealous defender of separate public restrooms for the sexes.
Mr. Patrick volunteered to sacrifice himself and every other American over 70 by claiming he was ready to “get back to work” and “all in” on a hypothetical: “As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” For a lot of reasons we are lucky — and grateful — that no one took Mr. Patrick up on his offer, but the luckiest septuagenarian of all may be Mr. Patrick himself, who would have been forced to find a way to weasel out of the patently empty promise he made in the first place.
And then there is Senator John Cornyn, who urged his constituents not to panic by posting a photo of a Corona beer on March 14, just after the number of cases in Texas rose to over 2,200. Then, on March 18, he blamed China for the virus by stating that the people there “eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that” and diseases get transmitted from animals to people. But Mr. Cornyn was also at his finger-wagging best in early April, when he also explained his opposition to a vote-by-mail push by asserting that “if you can go to the grocery store, you can go to the polls.”
Ted Cruz recently told Fox News that the mainstream media was “trying to root for disaster.” Both senators have just been named to a White House task force to open the economy, which makes me feel not one iota safer.
My particular favorite, though, is Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas who published a very long column on March 16 on the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website headlined “The Coronavirus Hoax.” There just weren’t enough people with the disease to warrant the incursion into our civil liberties, he warned. That was just about a week before his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, came down with the faux virus himself.
I will say in defense of my state that none of these people are stupid; they aren’t the stereotypical yahoos that so many non-Texans like to imagine live among us in droves. No. They represent the stubborn if expediently applied strain of anti-government independence that is inherent in the Texas character, which conveniently dovetails with being a Trump toady.
Mr. Abbott’s fealty to the president, along with that of our senators, could mean that Texans could become the public health guinea pigs who will suffer mightily if the state opens too soon.
What all this behavior will mean in a state that is slowly turning purple is anyone’s guess. We are lucky that, thanks to local stay-in-place orders and a comparative lack of density in our cities, the number of Texas cases is “only” over 16,000, with deaths at over 390. But we are not at peak, experts tell us, and meanwhile over one million Texans have filed for unemployment. That’s a number that will cause a lot of restiveness here, and maybe some reflection on just how much actual leadership Republican leaders have displayed during this awful time.
Not that leadership hasn’t been on display in other quarters. Some of the slack has been taken up by the private sector, with restaurant and small-business owners banding together to help their colleagues and trying their best to fill in for a government that is M.I.A.
The big businesses have gotten into the act, too, in particular HEB, a San Antonio-based grocery store chain that has become a lifesaver during the kinds of climate emergencies that have become the new normal here (see: Hurricane Harvey, 2017). As my colleagues Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes reported recently in Texas Monthly, HEB has had a pandemic and influenza plan since 2005, when it first took note of the H5N1 threat. The chain put that plan in effect in 2009 when the H1N1 swine flu hit.
The company started looking at what was happening in Wuhan, China, in January and began instituting plans to keep its supply chains functioning, its shelves stocked and its employees safe. “We’re here to take care of our partners, take care of our customers, take care of our community,” said Justen Noakes, HEB’s director of emergency preparedness.
The company started looking at what was happening in Wuhan, China, in January and began instituting plans to keep its supply chains functioning, its shelves stocked and its employees safe. “We’re here to take care of our partners, take care of our customers, take care of our community,” said Justen Noakes, HEB’s director of emergency preparedness.
What a novel idea. Dad would be so proud.
Mimi Swartz (@mimiswartz), an executive editor at Texas Monthly, is a contributing opinion writer.
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A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: A Big Texas Coronavirus Flop. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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