Abbott fails us again
COVID-clogged hospitals led to the death of a veteran unable to get care for a treatable issue.
A little over a week ago, as U.S. soldiers risked their lives flying tens of thousands of Afghans and Americans to safety, U.S. Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson — who earned a Purple Heart in Afghanistan — went to the hospital in Bellville, west of Houston.
An emergency room physician discovered that Wilkinson had gallstone pancreatitis, a treatable condition in which a gallstone blocks the pancreatic duct and causes inflammation. He needed care the Bellville hospital couldn’t provide.
For more than six hours, according to a CBS report, Wilkinson waited.
No hospital had room for him. No ICU had beds. Hospital after hospital told his doctor they were bursting at the seams with COVID-19 patients.
Finally, a bed in a Houston VA hospital opened up. But not soon enough. The next day, Wilkinson died. He was only 46.
Bellville physician Dr. Hasan Kakli told CBS he had never, before Wilkinson, lost a patient to gallstone pancreatitis.
“We are playing musical chairs, with 100 people and 10 chairs,” Kakli said. “When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over.”
Daniel Wilkinson volunteered for a war most of us wanted no part of. A preventable illness was the official cause of death, but a preventable public health crisis is what killed this man of service and honor.
In the minds of a deafeningly vocal minority, we are locked in an age of tyranny because we are expected to wear masks and protect ourselves and our communities with a lifesaving vaccine.
The true tyranny is being trapped in this deadly pandemic with people who are actively helping it spread.
Those of us who have done our duty as responsible citizens to fight this virus are tired of having our efforts canceled by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. We’re tired of the masks, too. We’re tired of COVID test swabs that feel like they’re scratching our brains. We’re tired of getting calls from the school about “possible exposure” involving our kids.
Mostly, we’re tired of all the senseless death.
Wilkinson risked his life for America, and his fellow Americans wouldn’t even take basic steps to avoid hospitalization so there would be beds free when he needed it.
Those complicit in this cowardly betrayal of fellow citizens include Gov. Greg Abbott. He cannot claim ignorance, or brainwashing by Fox News, or trouble comprehending scientific studies. He is a bright man with an advanced degree. He knows vaccines and masks save lives.
Yet he has chosen to grovel to the right wing of his party to shore up his primary election. He has chosen politics over protecting human life.
When he saw the delta variant coming, he refused to help hospitals pleading for nurses. When he saw the surging cases and deaths, he did very little to raise Texas’ lagging vaccination rate and continued to parade around at campaign events without a mask until he caught COVID-19 himself. When he heard experts warning the delta variant was more contagious among children than the original, he refused to protect kids by requiring masks in schools. Then he blocked responsible school leaders from doing so.
Last week, when the blessed news of Pfizer’s full FDA vaccine approval was being celebrated, and officials at public schools and agencies were preparing to mandate a vaccine officially proven safe, Abbott blocked them as well. Where his previous ban on vaccine mandates applied only to those with emergency FDA approval, Abbott extended the prohibition to vaccines with full approval.
The results of Abbott’s failures are clear. Texas officials reported 14,033 COVID-19 cases among students last week — the highest number of student infections since the pandemic began. Ambulance wait times have nearly doubled. Houston-region hospitals reported a pandemic record high number of virus patients.
Of the 8,787 people who have died of COVID-19 in Texas since February, the state estimates only 43 were fully vaccinated — representing only 0.5 percent of deaths, the Texas Tribune reported, citing data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Of those 43, nearly all were over age 60, and the vast majority — nearly 75 percent — were fighting a serious condition such as diabetes, high blood pressure or cancer.
That means 99.5 percent of the dead were not fully vaccinated. And that means several thousand people who lost their lives didn’t have to.
Across the South, dismal vaccination rates among younger adults and teenagers are fueling the surge, Dr. Peter Hotez told Hearst Newspapers on Friday. He said virus transmission is currently higher in the U.S. South than anywhere else in the world.
The unvaccinated bear responsibility for their obstinacy — and some will pay with their lives. But we should save some concern for the non-COVID patients caught up in the competition for hospital beds and for those rare vaccinated individuals who did everything right but still end up requiring hospitalization for COVID.
With hospitals overflowing, all of us could be one heart issue or necessary medical procedure away from mortal danger. That, too, is a form of tyranny. It didn’t have to be this way. Texas’ seven-day death rate and hospitalization rates are spiking, according to CDC data, “competing” mainly with Florida and other Southern states. Residents of states with high vaccination rates, quite simply, are faring better.
This crisis, exacerbated by our governor’s actions, is costing lives. It’s also causing kids to miss school, parents to miss work, nurses and doctors to burn out and even leave the field of medicine.
Many of us are asking if there’s any point at which the state’s top officials will treat this dire threat with the same urgency they have given, say, combating the phantom of widespread voter fraud.
COVID-19 is no phantom. It is real. It is deadly.
But Gov. Abbott apparently has no interest in counting the corpses, which number 55,000 in Texas. He’s too busy counting votes.