South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Texas county claims to be virus-free
But even residents concede that boast likely is not true
MENTONE, Texas — Zoom in on the glowing red map of ever-escalating coronavirus cases in the continental United States and you will find one county that has been spared.
Like a lone house standing after a tornado has leveled a town, Loving County, in the shadeless plains of oil-rich West Texas, has yet to record a single positive case of the coronavirus.
“You can take that off!” Chuck Flushe told a visitor in a face mask at the window of his food truck as a pair of barefaced oil field workers milled about. “We don’t have the virus here.” If only itwere true. Though never included in the county’s official reports, at least one positive test for the coronavirus was recorded over the summer at a local health clinic in Mentone, the county’s only town, according to aworker at the clinic.
The man lived at what everyone in this part of Texas calls a “man camp”— temporary housing for transient oil and gas field workers — near the center of town when he became sick. But since he was not a permanent resident, and was quickly shuttled home, Loving County never reported the case. Its record remained intact.
Tenmonths after the first infection was recorded in the United States, the coronavirus has made its way into every corner of the country. More than 11.3 million people have tested positive for the virus, which causesCOVID-19.
Now even rural areas, which escaped the brunt of the pandemic early on, have become serious centers of new infections. In recent
months, a diminishing number of remote counties, including Loving County, remained the only places in the continental United States with no positive cases.
One by one, each has begun to record infections. The last besides Loving County to officially fall was Esmeralda County in Nevada, which reported its first case last week. Kalawao County in Hawaii, which has even fewer people than Loving County, also has reported no known cases.
Thosewho live in Loving County full-time — the U.S. mainland’s smallest population, with no more than 169 people stretched across 669 square miles — credit their relative antiviral success to the landscape and the sparseness of the population. They joke that they were socially distant before itwas cool.
“We don’t speak in terms of running how many cows per acre, it’s how many cows per section,” said Steve Simonsen, the county attorney. “A section is 640 acres.”
But despite the wideopen space, the county is busy. The census counts 10 times the number of workers in the county as residents. Trucks hauling equipment for the oil fields or big boxes of sand for fracking groan through town in a constant, noisy stream.
When one drives through the county at night, lights from the oil and gas operations flicker across the landscape, creating the mirage of a distant city.
“You top that hill and it looks like you’re driving into Dallas or Fort Worth,” Simonsen said.
But evenif the virus is not front of mind in Loving County, it has changed life
here.
The pandemic caused a downturn as oil prices dropped, reducing the number ofworkers in town. The man camps were less full. Hotel rooms that just months ago cost $350 a night in Pecos, the nearest large town, were now going for a third of the price.
“With the pandemic, a lot of stuff shut down,” said Ricardo Galan, 38, who works for a supplycompany that he said had dropped from 50 employees to 12.
A private health clinic offers coronavirus tests and performs around 20 per week, according toAnthony Luk, a 28-year-old paramedic there. Luk, like most workers in the county, lives in a trailer — his is attached to the clinic — and stays for two-week stints between periods of rest at home in Lubbock.
During his time there, he said, the clinic has had two
positive tests for the coronavirus: inAugust, involving the man camp near the center of Mentone, and another taken at a job site outside of Loving County.
The August case raised alarm at the county courthouse because clerks and other county workers often go to the camp for free lunch onworkdays.
“We’remade very known when something like that happens here,” said Angela Medlin, 31, a deputy county clerk who moved with her husband and four children to Mentone last year. “I know of at least one guy whowas sick, but they took him back to where he’s from,” she said, recalling the situation over the summer.
In town, residents drawa bright line between themselvesandthe visitingworkers. Those who live in the county full-time treat one another like members of an extended family bubble.
Some residents said they knew about cases of the coronavirus in the county, but because they were limited to visiting workers, the county still considers itself to be virus-free — if on a technicality.
Most tests conducted in the county have involved oil and gas field workers, according to Luk. And those would be recorded in the employees’ county of residence, not in Loving County, said Lara Anton, a state Health Department spokesperson.
Were any permanent residents infected? Officially, no. But Loving County residents concede that their perfect record is probably no longer perfect.
“To say that we’re the only place in the United States that’s never had a COVID case, I don’t think that’s true,” Simonsen said. “It’s a nice little bit of hype, but certainly it’s been here.”