As The New York Times reports, it’s not just a matter of new cases growing in South Texas. This same cluster of small cities also has the worst death rates in the entire country over the last two weeks. In part that’s because the rapid growth of new cases has overwhelmed local health care, but as in so many cases, it’s also because that local health care was inadequate to begin with.
Though the record number of deaths is still, at this point, held by the state of New York, those deaths came due to a huge and unanticipated surge at the very beginning of the outbreak. It also came at a time when the few therapeutic treatments that have proven effective in saving COVID-19 patients were not yet available and when the impact of simple changes—like how intubated coronavirus patients were much more likely to survive when rested on their sides rather than on their backs—were not yet clear. New York has one of the best networks of hospitals and health care in the nation, and there’s little doubt that had such an initial huge outbreak taken place in any other city, it would have been worse than New York.
Whats happening now in Texas is more similar to damage done to Black communities in and around Detroit. The mortality rates in that area were—and still are—very high, specifically because the health care available to many areas matches the average income: poor.
Starr County, Texas, home to a single hospital, topped the charts with a death rate from COVID-19 over the last two weeks of 0.68 deaths per 1,000 people. That’s not 1,000 people infected. Just per 1,000 people. That doesn’t seem surprising as an earlier Times story detailed how that single hospital in a county of 65,000 was completely overwhelmed by the number of cases coming in. As of Thursday, Starr County had reported 2,580 cases and 81 deaths—all handled by just a dozen doctors and that 45-bed hospital. If you do the math, it’s clear that the actual rate of deaths in Starr County is more like 1.2 people per 1,000. It’s just that over half those deaths have come in the last two weeks.
That level of overcrowding is why since late June, the hospital in Starr County has had an “ethics committee” triaging care. Some get treated, a few get medevaced to a larger hospital. The rest are sent home to die.
All of this shows the absolute connection between income and health care. If these same Americans lived in districts where incomes were higher, many of them would not be dying because they would have facilities much more suited to the size of the population. And since in America income is invariably connected to race, those people who are sent home to die, or who get inadequate care, are almost invariably Black or Latino.
Source: http://feeds.dailykosmedia.com/~r/dailykosofficial/~3/Qe7-WArxxdI/-Texas-border-communities-are-overwhelmed-by-a-pandemic-that-is-getting-worse-not-better