LAREDO, Texas — The Facebook page Priscilla Trevino runs is no longer used for fun memes or entertaining social interactions.
“Our Facebook has become an obituary,” Trevino said. “We see people dying left and right. We see loved ones suffering.”
It’s the COVID-19 story heard across the state. By now, many know someone who’s been sick or passed.
Trevino feels the pain of the entire Laredo community, a citizen journalist, she knows her city well.
“People in Laredo, the elderly are scared,” she said. “Many other people who have underlying conditions are scared. I for one, I'm scared.”
Trevino’s city has had the highest hospitalization rate in Texas, since Dec. 10, 2020, according to the letter Laredo’s City Manager sent to Governor Greg Abbott on behalf of the city on Jan. 20.
According to numbers from Richard Chamberlain, the Health Director for the City of Laredo Health Department, the hospitalization rate went from hovering at 30 percent on Dec. 10, 2020, to peaking at 48.77 percent on Jan. 16. On Feb. 1, Laredo had a 42.94 percent hospitalization rate.
“It's dire. The numbers have been fluctuating,” said Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz. “It appears that they want to stabilize, but yet the numbers are still very high.”
Saenz said he’s hopeful that at the moment; the number is hovering not much higher past the 40 percent mark means the curve could be flattened.
In one of his executive orders, Gov. Abbott defined “areas with high hospitalizations,” as having seven consecutive days in which “the number of COVID-19 hospitalized patients as a percentage of total hospital capacity exceeds 15 percent.”
Laredo has been above 15 percent for at least 69 days.
“What we need less people getting sick,” Mayor Saenz said. “These restaurant bars are some of the primary violators.”
Saenz said the city has stepped up enforcement and is trying different ways to reach the community, including robocalls talking about COVID-19.
“It's gotten the attention of the people,” he said.
But not enough. In addition to the Jan. 20 letter to the governor, the city manager sent another one on Jan. 29, in it “re-urging” the Governor to grant the city executive consent to lower dine in restaurant capacity from 50 to 25 percent, to mitigate the “surge of COVID-19 within our community.”
“But as of yet, we haven't heard,” Mayor Saenz said. “The message from his office through Mr. Luis Saenz (Abbott’s Chief of Staff) has been enforce, enforce, enforce the laws.”
In an emailed statement Tuesday, Governor’s spokesperson Renae Eze wrote, "Governor Abbott established the existing protocols in consultation with doctors and medical experts to ensure the integrity of our hospital system and so as not to overwhelm the capacity of our hospital regions. The proven course of action, time and again, is to enforce those protocols. They proved effective in slowing the spread over the summer and containing the virus, and in recent weeks in communities that experienced spikes. They can continue to work, but only if enforced.
“Increased restrictions will do nothing to mitigate COVID-19 and protect communities without enforcement. And even states with increased restrictions and lockdowns throughout the pandemic have done little to mitigate the virus, such as California and Rhode Island, which have the highest COVID-19 infection rates per capita in the world, and New York, which is leading the nation in COVID-19 deaths."
Eze provided a link to a COVID-19 study.
“We should close the city, but the governor hasn't yielded to that,” said Dr. Ricardo Cigarroa, a longtime Laredo physician.
“Anyone who says that distance doesn't work, shutting down a city doesn't work for a short period of time, they need to walk through our hospitals and see it firsthand and not be in some office far away,” he said.
As of Feb. 2, 2021, 650 people died in Webb County as the result of COVID-19.