'The hotspot of a hotspot of a hotspot': coronavirus takes heavy toll in south Texas
Seventy-two death notices sprawled across an entire page of the Monitor newspaper in Hidalgo county recently.The small-print entries, stacked in five tidy columns, didn’t mention Covid-19. But 27 residents of the south Texas community had died from the virus that day, 22 the day before, and 35 the day before that.“I’ve never seen that ever in my life,” recalled John M Kreidler, a local funeral director, whose family has run Kreidler Funeral Home in McAllen for over a century.That was earlier this month, but things have worsened since. The coronavirus pandemic haunts almost everything in this part of the Rio Grande valley, where more than 92% of the almost 900,000 strong population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.Hand-sanitizing machines and big bins with masks and gloves surround shoppers at the regional grocery store. Outside of Nomad Shrine Club, a rundown event space turned drive-thru pop-up, residents join a long line of people in cars in search of a Covid-19 test with rapid results. Even Tex Mex, a gentlemen’s club, has a somber message for patrons: “Clothed Again.”“The Rio Grande Valley has become the hotspot of a hotspot of a hotspot,” said Ivan Melendez, Hidalgo county’s health authority and a practicing clinician. “We’re at the epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States.”Melendez recalled recently encountering a critically ill patient with an alarmingly low pulse. He tried to warn someone, but nurses informed him that a different doctor had already decided not to intervene because they “didn’t expect for [the patient] to survive”.In the United States, where the prevailing mantra for physicians is “do no harm”, that kind of ruthless calculation strikes deep, especially when so many of the lives at stake are medically vulnerable and easily exploited. More
