Coronavirus in rural America (Part CIII): The Texas borderlands

The New York Times ran this story today out of the Big Bend area of Texas, dateline Alpine, population 5,905.  Sarah Mervosh reports:  

It is one of the fastest-growing coronavirus hot spots in the nation, but there are no long lines of cars piled up for drive-through testing and no rush of appointments to get swabbed at CVS.

That’s because in the rugged, rural expanse of far West Texas, there is no county health department to conduct daily testing, and no CVS store for more than 100 miles. A handful of clinics offer testing to those who are able to make an appointment.

Out past the seesawing oil pumpjacks of Midland and Odessa, where roadrunners flit across two-lane roads and desert shrubs freckle the long, beige horizon, the Big Bend region of Texas is one of the most remote parts of the mainland United States and one of the least equipped to handle an infectious disease outbreak. There is just one hospital for 12,000 square miles and no heart or lung specialists to treat serious cases of Covid-19.

Here's a related New York Times story, from early August out of Starr County, Texas, population 60,968, which is much farther southeast in the Rio Grande Valley, also Texas's border region.  Edgar Sandoval reports under the headline "'Like a Horror Movie':  A Small Border Hospital Battles the Coronavirus," and the subhead is "The hospital in Starr County, Texas, had no I.C.U. and only one doctor on duty for each shift.  Then the coronavirus began."  It's a story of an under-resourced hospital in a high poverty county with a large LatinX population.  (Read more about that region and its medical resources here and here, along with an Austin-American Statesman op-ed from 2015, which is no longer available).   

A Washington Post story from last month covered the struggle of small health providers to acquire protective equipment.  A quote about what's happening in rural Texas follows:  

The Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals had never bought members any type of supplies until its president, John Henderson, started getting frantic daily calls about PPE from many of the state’s 157 rural hospitals. “We were at the end of the supply chain, and the supply chain was broken,” he said.

TORCH, as the group is known, began developing relationships with vendors and buying and collecting donations of masks, hand sanitizer and other gear. It crammed boxes into its Austin offices and created chains of volunteers to drive, relay-style, across Texas’s expanse for deliveries.

Now, as the pandemic surges in West Texas, stressors are reemerging, and gloves are a particular trouble spot, Henderson said. But most of the state’s rural hospitals are far closer to having what they need, according to Henderson and several hospital chief executives.

And here's a September 2019 Washington Post story by Eli Saslow about the physician shortage in far west Texas.  This was reported, of course, long before the pandemic.  The headline is "‘Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles."  The dateline is Van Horn, Texas, population 2,063, about an hour and half drive from Alpine, though just one county separates the two.  

Another big story out of this region from nearly five years ago is here.  It involves Justice Antonin Scalia's death while on a hunting trip to the region--and the bureaucratic consequences of that area's isolation.