COVID-19 Is Killing My People--And No One Seems to Care

[Nevilledog]

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Carlos Sanchez
@CarlosASanchez
My 1st person account of being hospitalized with COVID-19:

COVID-19 Is Killing My People—And No One Seems to Care
It almost killed me. A story of criminal neglect and mass death in South Texas.
theatlantic.com

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/mass-death-in-south-texas/616907/

At half past one on the morning of July 1, my 60th birthday, I awoke shivering. Since summertime chills are rare in South Texas, I immediately grew concerned. As the director of public affairs for Hidalgo County, just one county removed from the bottom of the state, I had been spending my days urging people to be on the lookout for symptoms that might indicate a COVID-19 infection. Chief among them were chills and a fever. Looking at my sleeping wife, a committed germaphobe, I crawled out of bed to hunt down a thermometer.

Ninety-nine degrees; a low-grade fever. Crawling back into bed, I knew my life was about to change: Part of the public-health-education message I’d been hammering was Self-isolate if you begin showing symptoms. Over the next hour, my temperature continued to rise. I woke my wife and told her to leave the room. That was the last time we would share a bed for two months.

I had already learned enough about the virus to be worried. I knew I would have to self-isolate for two weeks. I had started my government job less than six months earlier, after 37 years as a journalist. As a new employee still in my probationary period, would I lose my job? Would I lose my health insurance at the time I needed it most? Would my wife and children get infected? Would my elderly father-in-law, who was living with us, get sick? Would he die? Would I? Within two weeks I would be hospitalized, feverish and delirious, dependent on supplemental oxygen to breathe. But I didn’t know that yet. I also didn’t know how much the lives of the people in my county were about to change. The virus was about to tear through the Rio Grande Valley.

My part of the country doesn’t get much attention—not from the government, not from the media, certainly not from President Donald Trump (except when he’s ranting about his big, beautiful wall). We’re much closer to Mexico City and Monterrey than we are to New York City and Washington, D.C. People here laugh when the national media describe San Antonio as “South Texas”; Hidalgo County lies three hours farther south. Our county is more than 90 percent Hispanic; we are disproportionately poor, disproportionately susceptible to debilitating disease, disproportionately living without health insurance. But we are also human beings, and what happened to us this summer—what is still happening to us, in fact—shouldn’t happen to anyone. What happened to New York and its 8.3 million residents at the start of the pandemic drew global attention, and I’m glad it did. But the impact of COVID-19 on my county and its more than 850,000 residents is going mostly unnoticed. My community is brutally vulnerable to this disease. People are dying, and as far as we can tell, the world doesn’t really seem to care.

*snip*

[Skittles]

1. I care, a lot of us care

it's driving a lot of people to vote, too

[Lucinda]

2. KNR

[Initech]

3. That Nero analogy from a few months ago couldn't be more accurate.

Trump plays the fiddle (MAGA rallies) while Rome burns (Americans die of COVID).

[Cha]

4. We Care A Lot. but Fucking trumps Do NOT.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[Hermit-The-Prog]

6. Employment-dependent health care is nuts.

If you're alive, you deserve health care. We do not need health insurance companies running interference between people and health care. Let's replace the current wealth care system with a health care system.