Babies hooked to ventilators. Overflow tents pitched outside of hospitals. Parents fretting that sending their kids to school might become an intolerable risk.
It’s surreal to write this. Just a few months ago we were celebrating Parkland Hospital’s closing of its COVID-19 intensive care units in Dallas. We noted that Gov. Greg Abbott was right to reopen Texas in the spring, as COVID-19 case numbers slumped and vaccines became widely available in the weeks that followed.
Now comes a disastrous turn. A plateau in vaccination rates and the more contagious delta variant were just the recipe to send cases skyrocketing again. The Dallas-Fort Worth region has swung from a low of 289 hospitalizations in June to more than 2,600 as of last Thursday, seemingly on a trajectory to hit numbers we last saw in January, when we peaked at more than 4,100 hospitalizations. Also as of last Thursday, our 19-county trauma service area had no pediatric ICU beds left.
State data show that every trauma service area in Texas is experiencing an exponential rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations, even though those hospitalizations in some regions had sunk to single digits just months or weeks ago. Texas is in crisis again, but we don’t have clear leadership to attack the problem. It’s our governor’s responsibility to lead.
Court battles about who’s in charge will drag out the chaos. Abbott can wait for judges to sort out whose executive order trumps whose, or he can be the leader Texans need. We call on the governor to convene regularly scheduled meetings with the county judges from the state’s major metropolitan areas and work out a consensus plan to tackle the COVID-19 surge. Individual freedoms should be part of the discussion, but the difficulty is that it’s hard to untangle individual liberty from public health. Stemming community spread of a virus that’s causing a pandemic also enhances personal freedoms by both reducing public pressure for restrictive precautions and shielding individuals from illness. Recognizing this, we hope leaders at all levels forge a working relationship to address the rise in COVID-19 cases.
County judges need to join the governor. All of them should leave party politics behind and honestly discuss how the state can implement public health measures that will lower the spread of the disease.
No one should expect to get all they want. In Dallas, we are stuck between County Judge Clay Jenkins’ sweeping order on masking and Abbott’s laissez-faire maskless plan.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are areas of obvious middle ground — beginning with schools.
The onus for leadership falls first to the governor, however. He has preached personal responsibility, though that is plainly not enough to stop the rise in serious infections showing up in our hospitals.
The consensus is that it’s better for children to learn in school than remotely, but children under 12 can’t get the vaccine yet. Wearing a mask is an imposition, and we understand why it’s frustrating to see such mandates make a return. However, we must reject attempts to turn public health guidance into a political grenade.
The best thing for all of us is to get COVID-19 under control again. We’re grateful that Abbott has a plan to recruit more health care workers to assist strained hospitals, but what we need is to curb the spread of the disease. That will involve masks and doing even more to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
Last Thursday, nearly half of North Texas’ ICU beds were occupied by patients with COVID-19, and only 75 ICU beds — about 5% of the intensive care capacity in the region — were open. Every occupied bed is a Texan, every hospitalization a disaster for a Texas family. This could be a disaster for the governor, too, if he doesn’t work with local leaders to stem the flow of patients.
Dallas Morning News
