COVID fatigue is real, but so is this deadly illness. We can’t let up
Houstonians who have straggled through the first 10 months of the coronavirus pandemic might be tempted to let their guard down.
Sure, we know at an intellectual level that the pandemic isn’t over. Public health officials are urging us to remain vigilant, with some even suggesting we cancel plans to gather with friends and family over the coming holidays.
“Even if we’re tired of COVID-19, it’s not tired of us,” said Umair Shah, the outgoing executive director of Harris County Public Health, recently. And on Monday, Houston Mayor Sylvester
Turner announced that the city’s Thanksgiving parade would be canceled for the first time in its history and replaced with a food distribution event at NRG Center this weekend.
Granted, there’s good news on the horizon, starting with the fact that we may soon have two vaccines that protect against COVID-19. Pfizer announced last week that it has developed a vaccine that protected 90 percent of study participants from illness, and Moderna followed a week later with similarly auspicious findings.
Moderna’s vaccine was developed with the financial assistance of none other than Dolly Parton, who reportedly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University after hearing of “some exciting advancements” by researchers there. Who could hear that detail and not feel heartened?
And while outgoing President Donald Trump has taken a desultory attitude towards the coronavirus — particularly since losing the election — President-elect Joe Biden clearly intends to treat the virus with more urgency. Trump has not attended a meeting of his coronavirus task force for five months; Biden unveiled his COVID-19 advisory group within days of being declared the victor. The 77-year-old Democrat has been continuously sounding the alarm about what Americans should expect in the coming weeks.
“The crisis does not respect
dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now,” Biden said Friday, in a written statement. “Urgent action is needed today, now, by the current administration — starting with an acknowledgment of how serious the current situation is.”
The data show our current situation is very serious. Coronavirus cases are rising across most of the country, and the White House Task Force — the one that Trump seems to have forgotten about — warned us as much: earlier this month, the task force noted “significant deterioration in the Sunbelt as mitigation efforts were decreased.”
Some state leaders, of both parties, have responded accordingly.
“A pandemic is raging in our state,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, on Monday. He put new restrictions on the state’s gyms, restaurants and movie theaters for the coming weeks. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, ordered a shutdown in the state’s most populous counties Monday, citing a doubling in the state’s daily case rates.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, issued the state’s first mask mandate Tuesday. The same day, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, also a Republican, announced that the state will have a curfew starting Thursday and lasting for the next three weeks.
“We believe this is going to help,” DeWine explained.
It may seem that Texas has been spared from this surge, because our state leaders haven’t announced any new such restrictions, or even seemed particularly troubled by the virus.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who earlier this year removed the power of local officials to issue stay-at-home orders, has been a subdued presence. Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, loyal as ever to Trump, has been busy humoring the president’s baseless assertions about widespread voter fraud. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday blasted his colleague Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, as “a complete ass” after the latter requested that another senator wear a mask while presiding over the Senate’s proceedings.
“He wears a mask to speak — when nobody is remotely near him — as an ostentatious sign of fake virtue,” Cruz, a Republican, tweeted. That’s the same Cruz who last month refused to wear a mask when asked to do so before speaking to reporters outside a Senate hearing room.
The fact is Texas last week became the first state to surpass one million confirmed coronavirus cases, and this week became the second state, after New York, to record more than 20,000 deaths from COVID-19. And to see how bad things can get, one need look no further than El Paso. A surge in COVID-19 cases has overwhelmed the city morgue and left health care workers on the brink of exhaustion. It also triggered a painful partisan fight when El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego issued a shutdown order, only to have it challenged by the state and overturned by the Eighth District Court of Appeals. In his ruling, Chief Justice Jeff Alley wrote there can only be “one captain of the ship” — meaning Abbott.
The problem is Abbott is taking a largely hands-off approach as captain, while simultaneously preventing local leaders, such as Samaniego and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, from stepping into the breach. “We’ve seen every indicator move in the wrong direction,” Hidalgo said Tuesday, urging Harris County residents to avoid multi-household Thanksgivings.
In other words, Texas is not so much weathering this new surge as much as lurching haplessly into it, with distracted — and, in Cruz’s case, dyspeptic — leadership.
The least we as individuals can do is be aware that the risk remains real and resist the temptation to act as if the coronavirus, as Trump famously predicted, will just disappear.
That’s a guarantee of more sickness, more suffering and more tragedy, especially for the most vulnerable among us. Thanksgiving is a time not only to be thankful for what we have, but to affirm to do what we can to keep others safe from this lurking killer.