San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas coast sees economic pain, little illness
In Corpus Christi, many people strain to name anyone infected with the coronavirus. In east central Wisconsin, members of the YMCA express frustration with a distant health crisis that shut down the group’s community services. In western Colorado, the summer recreational season was canceled before it even started — again with little sign of the virus.
The coronavirus has killed more than 100,000 Americans and brought much of the economy to a grinding halt. Though all 50 states have begun to reopen against a bitter partisan backdrop, in many parts of the country the dual health and economic calamities are not playing out in parallel.
A New York Times analysis of coronavirus infections, official layoff notices and federal unemployment data highlights the sharp disconnect between extreme economic pain and limited health impact from the pandemic in many parts of the country. It is a split that presents local officials and businesses with difficult choices even after Friday’s encouraging jobs report suggested more of the country was returning to work.
Some business owners and workers in these communities have embraced reopening as urgently overdue because of their firsthand experiences. Many are angry or confused. Others plead for caution. But most agree the virus has not posed the local public health threat that so many were expecting — even while acknowledging that things could get worse and the numbers would likely already be higher with more testing.
The Times focused the analysis on 726 counties in 45 states that fall within the lower half of infection rates nationwide. Those counties have had fewer than 140 cases of coronavirus per 100,000 residents and unemployment rates over 12 percent in April, the latest month for which official county data is available. (By contrast, New York City has had 2,483 cases per 100,000 residents.)
Four of the counties where residents are wrestling with the disconnect are in Colorado, Florida, Texas and Wisconsin. Largely out of the spotlight, they have not had overwhelmed morgues, or piles of body bags in hospitals, or dozens of deaths linked to a single nursing home. In these four counties, there has been mostly waiting.
“In the first two weeks when they said this was coming, I was like, ‘Let’s all stay in, hunker down, and if we all do this, that can help while we figure out what is going on,’” said Stephanie Anderson, a real estate agent in Satellite Beach, Fla.
But since “places here aren’t producing mass death,” she said, “don’t tell me I can’t open my business in a responsible manner.”
Scratching heads in Texas
In Corpus Christi, the oil and gas and vacation town on the southeastern coast of Texas, it can be tough to find people who have experienced the coronavirus’s devastation, or even know someone who has.
But people hit with job losses or business closures? They are everywhere.
Theresa Thompson has been furloughed from her position as a catering and events manager at a Holiday Inn. Richard Lomax has seen sales fall by more than 90 percent at the two restaurants his family owns. Brett Oetting, chief executive of the tourism office, has been working with countless businesses struggling to navigate the economic collapse.
None of them knows anyone local who has been sickened by the virus.
In early March, things were as busy as ever in Corpus Christi and across Nueces County. But then fears of the coming virus hit and nearly everything came to an abrupt halt. The beaches cleared. The oil rigs idled. The hotels emptied.
“For a very long time, everyone in the business community was scratching their heads,” said Lomax, whose family operates Water Street Oyster Bar and Executive Surf Club. Together they furloughed about 150 of their 200 employees.
“You look around, there is beautiful weather and the beaches are empty and you don’t know anyone who has it,” he said. “That is hard — to keep that disciplined mindset.”
‘It’s been a nightmare’
Brevard County, Fla., touts itself as the only place in the country to watch a space launch from the beach. When the first manned launch since the end of the shuttle program blasted off last weekend, tens of thousands did just that.
The event helped announce to the world that Florida’s Space Coast was reopening for business. For many residents, the moment was late in coming.
“It’s been a nightmare, to be honest,” said Puneet Kapur, who has managed the Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Palm Bay for 11 years.
The hotel went down to 10 percent occupancy from 95 percent during the peak of spring break, Kapur said. During the worst of it, he laid off about two-thirds of his staff.
He has since rehired some of them and says he is staying positive: “Our county is open for tourists.”
Virus vs. economy
Bill Breider, who runs five YMCA centers in east central Wisconsin, described having to shutter them for most of March, April and May as “heartbreaking” and “agonizing.”
About one in five people across the region belongs to the organization, which provides a “second home” for older residents, day care for the children of working parents, and everyday programming like swim lessons and fitness training.
The centers also provide more than 1,500 full- and part-time jobs.
“We have had to make some gut-wrenching decisions around furloughs and layoffs, coupled with how to keep employees safe,” said Breider, the chief executive of the YMCA of the Fox Cities, which has four of its five centers in Outagamie County.
An organization built on service suddenly could not serve — even as the region experienced relatively few confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The centers reopened with restrictions late last month. Before that, only day care services for children of essential workers had been running.
The virus-versus-economy dynamic created a “tug back and forth as to what is the right thing to do,” Breider said. “It is a difficult time because I think there is a feeling like we need to open back up, we need a sense of normalcy.”
Far from Denver, pushed up against the Utah border, Mesa County is known for its stunning flat-topped mountains and abundant outdoor activities. Residents are proud of their record so far on the coronavirus — just 55 known cases, and nearly all have already recovered — but some worry about the price the county has paid.
The largest country music festival in Colorado has been canceled. So has the Junior College Baseball World Series. Despite getting state permission to open some businesses before the rest of Colorado, many in the county are struggling — and patience is thinning.
“Obviously we don’t want to let it get away from us, we don’t want to ruin a good thing, but did it really have to be this level of shutdown?” said Doug Simons, a thirdgeneration owner of Enstrom Candies, which has five retail stores that have remained open as essential businesses.
“There was a real reluctance from our leaders to let things open back up, even though we had practically zero disease in our community,” he said. “I thought: ‘What the heck is going on? We don’t have any cases here and we’re being told to shut down like it’s New York City.’”
Weekends that used to draw thousands and cause hotels to sell out have passed by quietly. Graduation last month from Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, the county’s biggest city, was held online.
Angela Padalecki, executive director of the Grand Junction Regional Airport, equates the sadness and anger among residents with stages of grief.
“We’re grieving the loss of those good times,” she said.