Texas Makes Convention Center a Hospital Amid COVID Surge, Polling-Place Masks Still Optional
Source: Newsweek
A sprawling convention center in El Paso will act as a makeshift hospital starting this week, as the southern Texas city grapples with spiking COVID-19 cases and a subsequent surge in hospitalizations related to the disease.
But while the state amplifies its response to El Paso's coronavirus outbreak, Texas is reporting an enormous turnout at in-person polling places, where participants are not required to wear face masks. The sharp uptick in El Paso's COVID-19 cases has occurred during Texas' early voting period, which commenced on October 13 and ends this upcoming Friday.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Sunday plans to expand the El Paso's hospital capacity using the El Paso Convention and Performing Arts Center, in partnership with the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM). The site will initially offer 50 additional hospital beds, with the potential to double its capacity if necessary, as well as medical equipment. According to the governor's office, TDEM personnel and other Texas health officials have also worked to establish auxiliary medical units at local hospitals as part of their efforts to meet increasing patient needs.
"The alternate care site and auxiliary medical units will reduce the strain soon hospitals in El Paso as we contain the spread of COVID-19 in the region," Abbott said in a statement released Sunday morning. "We continue to work closely with local officials in El Paso and provide resources to reduce hospitalizations, mitigate the spread, and keep the people of El Paso safe."
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-makes-convention-center-a-hospital-amid-covid-surge-polling-place-masks-still-optional/ar-BB1anDLw
Even as COVID-19 is surging, the Texas Supreme Court has upheld the Governor's order limiting ballot drop boxes in populous counties.
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Here in Philly and many locations in the Midatlantic, they were bringing in refrigerated trucks, including some from chain stores, to hold bodies.
https://billypenn.com/2020/03/26/philly-rushing-to-add-morgue-space-in-advance-of-covid-19-death-surge/
Here were some lined up in NYC (DOD set aside 85 + 100K body bags) -
And the Wawa chain sent one of their refrigerated food trucks from here in PA to NJ -
Link to tweet
TEXT
@GovMurphy
.@Wawa sent a 53-foot refrigerated truck to Bergen County after hearing about our need for refrigerated trucks to help take the pressure off our morgues and funeral homes in protecting the bodies of those we have lost.
Their help is invaluable. We’re so thankful.
1:30 PM · Apr 8, 2020
The large cities in the NE/MA also set up "overflow" facilities in convention centers, etc., to offload people who were in hospitals for more "routine" or serious care that was non-covid related. NYC set up the Jacob Javitz Center -
where CNN had reported nearly 1000 had been treated at the time along with almost 200 at the USNS hospital ship "Comfort" -
and here in Philly they set up the Liacouras Center (Temple University's arena) -
Fortunately because our Governors did a COMPLETE LOCK DOWN we were able to halt the extreme rise in cases, hospitalizations, and subsequent deaths, and start to "flatten the curve". I noticed that no one talks about "flattening the curve" anymore.
All I know is that back this past April, after our state of PA was shut down for all but essential businesses (where essential included supermarkets, pharmacies, etc), I remember walking into my closest supermarket and staring in horror at the empty shelves. Aisle after aisle, with a few items sprinkled here and there. It felt like I had stepped into a dystopian sci-fi movie.
We are marginally in a better place now - at least in terms of having masks available, which was not the case back then other than those of us who managed to grab some N95s from Home Depot before they were gone. It took months before those stores started to have somewhat of a semblance of returning to normalcy with respect to stock (although the reduced levels of toilet paper brands/types still hasn't been fully resolved here yet).
There is a pervasive sentiment where people see a stat like the COVID-19 death rate, which appears to the general public as "minuscule" despite being many times more than that of the flu, and thus there is the thinking that it'll be "just like a cold and you get over it". There have been so many reports of people who never really needed hospitalization but who also never really "got over it", with lingering symptoms like fatigue, and who knows what damage that might have been caused to vital organs.
It's just not something to play with. 
Those of us who are in states that were getting hit hard in the spring, often saw little sympathy for our plight and even lesser expectation that other parts of the country would ever experience it, notably the lesser populated and rural areas. But here we are, going into fall watching the pandemic rage from afar and going through it once more ourselves...
by Mike Newall, Updated: May 5, 2020
David Drysdale Jr. stood in the hallway of the crematorium his family has run for three generations and took stock of the pandemic’s dead. He could barely move. The bodies, in cardboard cremation boxes, had overtaken the hallway. He had to cut a path around them. The refrigerators were long past filled. So was the receiving vault, the moss-covered stone edifice in East Mount Airy’s Ivy Hill Cemetery and Crematory that hadn’t held a body in a century — not since the 1918 flu epidemic swept through the city, leaving devastation in its wake.
In the grip of that crisis, the gravediggers at the historic cemetery could not dig fast enough. By late April, as the coronavirus continued to extract its toll, Drysdale and his crematorium operators could not keep up with the unrelenting flow of bodies, the line of hearses that snaked down the driveway and through the cemetery’s cresting hills. They had tried to prepare. They watched the death toll in New York, and knew Philadelphia’s dead would be coming. They cleaned out the old receiving vault, beneath the shade of a red maple tree.
And Drysdale added an extra crew to keep up. But he soon realized there was no keeping up. The cremation machines burned all day, so hot that even in the mornings, after cooling all night, the bricks glowed cherry-red. Some of the dead were from the same family. A mother and son. A father and son. All of the families were denied the chance to say goodbye. Drysdale wanted to help grieving families and accommodate funeral directors, who were as overwhelmed as he was. But storing bodies in a crematorium hallway does not afford the dead the dignity he was taught they deserve.
So, standing among the victims of a vicious virus, he decided he had to cap the number of bodies the crematory could accept on any given day at 40. Still a number unlike any he’d seen in his life, and his life has been spent at the cemetery. “It’s not a production line,” he said last week. “Whether we do 100 [cremations] or we do one, we got to do the right thing. We got to take our time.”
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-ivy-hill-cemetery-crematory-20200505.html
that funerals are often several times that cost - upwards of $6,000 - $10,000 (including any embalming, casket, flowers, hearse, cemetery plot if one had not already been available, headstone, etc), and that is why unless one is religiously opposed to it, families are forced to go that route. 
