In West Texas, lingering distrust in government as coronavirus spreads
LUBBOCK, Texas — For a while, it seemed that the coronavirus had spared West Texas. Cases were low. Few had died. Concern through the spring was focused on getting businesses running again.
By mid-June, the Texas Tech football team returned to campus. Local baseball tournaments resumed. Hotels filled up.
Then people started getting sick.
In Lubbock, a city of 250,000 with a rollicking college bar scene, more people tested positive for the virus in the past three weeks than in the previous three months combined. On the day Gov. Greg Abbott began to swiftly reopen the state, two months ago, the city recorded eight positive tests for the virus. On Wednesday, there were 184.
The sudden jump, concentrated among those in their 20s, reflected a sharp and uncontrolled rise in the virus that has hit Texas harder than many other places in the country. Unlike the early weeks of the pandemic, when infections were concentrated in the state’s mainly liberal cities, the virus has now reached into the deep-red regions of the state that have resisted aggressive public health regulation.
Yet for many conservatives, even those with the virus now at their door, the resurgence has not changed opinions so much as hardened them.
For those Texans, trust in government is gone, if it was there to begin with, and that includes some of the state’s top leaders. On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas declared himself tired of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor.
“I don’t need his advice anymore,” Patrick said.
That sentiment was echoed outside a popular, newly opened hamburger restaurant in Wolfforth, Texas, just outside Lubbock, where even Abbott, a Republican, came under harsh criticism.
“It seems like he’s been influenced by Fauci and the left,” said Mark Stewart, who sat with his wife and children and several other families at a gathering for locals who home school.
None in the 18-person group, which squeezed around several outside tables, wore masks or made an attempt to stay distant.
“This is the first time we’ve met each other, and we don’t care,” said Stewart’s wife, Tamera, adding that other people might take precautions when they are together and stay far apart. “Texas has all kinds. But we’re done with all that.”
Such attitudes present a daunting challenge for local leaders trying to contain a resurgent outbreak, especially in solidly Republican areas, where mandatory public health measures can generate swift opposition.
And they could complicate an order by the governor, issued late Thursday, requiring Texans to wear face coverings in public, with few exceptions, or be fined up to $250. The order applies to counties with more than 20 positive cases, in other words, most of the state.
It is the sort of requirement that Lubbock’s conservative mayor, Dan Pope, an eighth-generation Texan, sought to avoid imposing himself, opting instead to urge compliance from his avowedly independent-minded constituents.
“My approach all along has been one of personal responsibility,” Pope said in an interview from a ground-floor conference room in the city’s new municipal building.
He said he would enforce the governor’s mask order nevertheless.
The mayor, who wore a black Lubbock-branded face mask, was working out of the conference room, rather than his 11th-floor office, because his adult daughter who lives in town had recently tested positive for the coronavirus. His younger brother had also been infected, he said.
“I’m clean as far as our health department goes; I just think in an abundance of caution — I don’t want to be the guy,” Pope said. “I’m asking our people to act this way. Why wouldn’t I act that same way?”