‘We are in a crisis situation’
Coronavirus is ripping through the border city of El Paso, filling up hospitals— and funeral homes
EL PASO — When Adela Santiago gazes out from her home, past the towering steel border wall and the Rio Grande, she wonders how she will survive the rest of this year.
“I was just starting to work again when it hit me,” said Santiago, 50, who contracted the coronavirus weeks ago and is still recovering. “It’s so, so hard to survive. We don’t know how to sustain ourselves. How can we make enough bread for the family?”
Across El Paso, the coronavirus is breaking records every day, claiming jobs and hundreds of lives. A border city thatwas always vulnerable but was largely spared during the summer surge is now facing the virus’ wrath. COVID-19 is ripping through families and upending life in lasting ways.
“We are in a crisis situation,” said Dr. Alison Days, president of the El Paso County Medical Society and a member of the city’s COVID-19 task force. “That’s because we’re surging in a way we haven’t had, and we’re using up all our resources we haven’t had to use up to this point.”
Hospitalizations have increased by more than 460 percent in the last month. COVID-19 patients now occupy more than 1,000 hospital beds. More than one-sixth of the state’s COVID-19 hospitalizations are in El Paso. As of this week, only 15 intensive care beds are available in El Paso County and two adjacent counties, according to state figures.
More than 630 people have died during the pandemic, according to the city, with 289
more deaths under investigation. Recently, more than 1,000 new cases have been reported each day. The county’s positivity rate — the percentage of tests that come back positive for the virus — has soared to nearly 24 percent. With a total case count of 58,429, the per capita rate here is more than twice that of Harris County.
This year, cities along the Texas-Mexico boundary have been hammered by the virus. Their populations are disproportionately Latino and low-income and have higher rates of pre-existing conditions when compared with national averages. In July, the Rio Grande Valley — a region with 1.3 million residents and no public hospital — saw crisis levels of coronavirus-related hospitalizations and deaths. Now, along that same Rio Grande that defines the U.S. border, El Paso is suffering the same.
The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has sent disaster medical aid and trauma care teams to El Paso. The city has converted its convention center into a medical ward and testing site. The public hospital, University Medical Center, has setup tents in its parking lot to tend to patients. Surrounding them are mobile medical units sent from across Texas.
The death toll here is expected to soar in coming weeks. The county has installed a fourth mobile morgue unit in the medical examiner’s parking lot. Funeral homes that 15 months ago were burying the bodies of those killed in the Walmart mass shooting are now tending to COVID-19-ravaged bodies.
The Perches Funeral Home, which owns six homes in El Paso, converted its downtown chapel into a cooler that quickly filled with bodies. Overall, its coolers in El Paso are full, holding nearly 200 bodies. Its location in Las Cruces, N.M., is also full, with 100 bodies. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Perches’ three coolers are full of bodies, totaling 200, and the business is building a fourth.
“What can you do? Every day you wake up for another COVID funeral and hope you don’t hear bad news from your own family,” said Christopher Lujan, 43, manager of Sunset Funeral Homes. “We’re all hurting right now.”
‘The two cities’
On both sides of the border, 11 family members of Beatriz Escajeda, 63, have battled COVID-19.
“We are responsible because we go and take it there or we go and bring it here. El Paso, Ciudad Juárez — the two cities have a lot to do with it. A lot,” she said.
The porous border El Paso shares with Juárez was mentioned by doctors, COVID-19 survivors and funeral managers as one of a few possible explanations for the coronavirus’ surge in the region.
In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the coronavirus indicators are in the red zone. Juárez has re-
ported 12,000 positive cases and over 1,100 deaths. The figures are much less than El Paso’s, but the true counts are believed to be much higher. Testing has been difficult to access in Juárez, with private companies charging more than $100.
“There are ways we’re responding to health care here, but it doesn’t matter if people are going across the border,” Days said, adding that cooler temperatures, the start of school and league sports and the flu season are feeding the surge.
Leaders of both cities, united physically and culturally, have begun pointing fingers. Juárez Mayor Armando Cabada recently asked Mexico’s federal government to block travelers from the U.S., according to the El Paso Times. Now, U.S. citizens and legal residents can move back and forth across the border, as well as Mexican nationals crossing for work deemed essential.
“I do think the border here is a big reason why we’re having a surge,” Days said. “We were doing really well for a while, and then I think we got complacent.”
At the end of September, Escajeda visited her son in Juárez.
“We don’t know if he got it from me or I got it from him,” Escajeda said. But days afterward, she started vomiting and experiencing intense nausea. Then her whole body hurt, followed by a feeling that someone was pressing on her throat, closing her windpipe. By the time the ambulance came, Escajeda’s hands and lips were purple from lack of oxygen.
She was in the hospital for three days while her son battled coronavirus at home in Juárez. Two days after she was discharged Oct. 22, her husband was taken in an ambulance.
He’s been hospitalized ever since.
“On both sides, we let our guard down. We started thinking we could open up and relax. As soon as we relaxed, it started again,” she said.
Brandy Wyche, 45, manages a shop called Wave at the entrance to El Paso on the international bridge to Juárez. She said that in the last month, the shop had begun to get busy again. The influx of customers has soothed her financial concerns, she said, but heightened her health concerns.
“We couldn’t get people out of
here fast enough. It started worrying me,” Wyche said. “It was the outfits. They were party outfits. I’m like ‘Where are you going with these?’ And that’s when they talk about the house parties and quinceañeras.”
Restaurants were open to dining in at 75 percent capacity until mid-October, when positivity rates had already begun to spike, and Mayor Dee Margo ordered occupancy maximums reduced to 50 percent. Still, last week groups of people were congregating alongside each other in restaurant bars and cycling next to each other on gym bikes. People entered restaurants in masks and took them off for hours during long group dinners.
Throughout the last few months, enforcement has been minimal in El Paso, with few citations issued for folks gathering in large groups or not wearing masks, according to recently released enforcement data by the city.
Last week, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego ordered a shutdown of all nonessential businesses and services effective. But Margo quickly rebuffed the order.
Some gyms and dine-in restaurants still opened amid the squabble between the two officials. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton weighed in, suing the county judge. The El Paso Sheriff’s Department has committed to enforcing the shutdown. The city police, however, said they would not.
“Our hospitals are at capacity, and our medical professionals are overwhelmed,” Samaniego tweeted lastweek. “Ifwe don’t respond we will see unprecedented levels of death.”
‘Hard to survive’
Santiago, the woman whose home is next to the border wall, lives in San Elizario, southeast of El Paso and just a few miles from where she grew up in Mexico.
Her parents worked illegally in
El Paso when she was young, and they crossed the river frequently, sometimes bringing Santiago and her siblings when they were out of school. Their home was a oneroom cardboard shack in Juárez, their bathroom a wooden covering a few feet away.
She dropped out of school in sixth grade because her parents couldn’t afford the books, transportation and other expenses. She started working, helping her mother clean houses in the U.S. At 16, she crossed the border on her own with a visa and never moved back. She married a U.S. citizen at 19 and obtained a green card.
She has worked odd jobs: house cleaner, home health provider, babysitter.
For a home, she picked one close to the Rio Grande because glimpses of the river bring back childhood memories of her siblings playing and splashing in it while her mother washed clothes. It gives her hope for better times.
She’s looked at it often since the pandemic hit.
In March, her work as a home health aide ended. Bills for her house, lights and internet mounted. Stressed and vulnerable, she’s been going to food bank distributions, seeking donations and accepting services from local churches and nonprofits to keep afloat.
At the beginning of October, as businesses were gradually reopening, she received her first call to return to work as a health care provider. But just days later, Santiago got sick. It was COVID-19.
Santiago has four adult children and lives with her husband. She’s spent hundreds of dollars on medical care for her illness, pushing her further into debt.
Last month, a friend stopped by her house to place food and items on her doorstep and called her afterward. “Mira, mi reina, te traje esto,” she said. I brought you this.
“Those were the last words I heard from her,” Santiago said, tears in her eyes. “She was so strong, she seemed invincible. She seemed fine, and then in less than three weeks, she was gone. I thought, that’s not possible.”
Her friend had died from COVID-19 — the second close friend of hers to fall victim to the disease.
Santiago has to remain quarantined for about another week. But even then, there is little work for those with her skills. She’s been getting by on her husband’s pension of a few hundred dollars a month and her savings.
“At this point, what matters to me the most ismy health and the health of others. I don’t care if I’m left without light, if I’m left without water, if I’m left with nothing. I can survive that,” she said.
“These are things in life, right? We have to get over the pandemic,” Santiago continued. “Tenemos que echarle ganas, todas las ganas del mundo, para salir adelante.” We have to try as hard as we can to make it through.