At a COVID-19 maternity ward in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, women are granted just a few seconds to lay eyes – but no hands – on their babies. Here, the U.S. failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic has been laid bare.
RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — When labor pains signaled that Clarissa Muñoz was at last going to be a mom, she jumped in a car and headed two hours down the Texas border into one of the nation’s most dire coronavirus hot spots.
On America’s southern doorstep, the Rio Grande Valley, the U.S. failure to contain the pandemic has been laid bare. For nearly a month, this borderland of 2 million people in South Texas pleaded for a field hospital, but not until Tuesday was one ready and accepting patients. In July alone, Hidalgo County reported more than 600 deaths — more than the Houston area, which is five times larger.
This predominantly Hispanic region is cruelly vulnerable to COVID-19. The prevalence of diabetes here is roughly three times the national average, and households have among the lowest incomes in America, adding to the difficulty of thwarting the virus. At the hospital, a television monitor displays the struggle in real time: Teal rectangles represent occupied hospital beds, and green rectangles are open beds. The grid is nearly all teal. On a whiteboard, “body bags” is scrawled on a list of needed items.
One entrance to the hospital’s COVID-19 ward resembles an off-the-shelf patio door, the kind sold at big-box hardware stores. Last week, Alex Garcia, 26, visited his father by peering through the outside window of his room. Both men are pipeline workers. “This is great in Hartford, Connecticut, because everybody has a 4,000-square-foot home, the average income is $180,000 and all that. Down here, it’s very different,” said Dr. Efraim Vela, the hospital’s chief executive physician of women’s health. “We’re having problems with that.”
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