Just a few weeks ago, officials in Starr County thought their community might make it through the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the few lucky ones. The rural county on the Texas-Mexico border is among the poorest in the United States. There’s only one hospital, a 48-bed facility with no intensive care unit, to serve about 65,000 people. But until June, Starr had just over 30 total confirmed cases of the new coronavirus. Then Governor Greg Abbott began rapidly reopening the state and a wave of new infections swept across Texas counties, including Starr and the rest of the Rio Grande Valley.
Now confirmed cases in the border county have jumped to more than 840, an increase of about 3,000 percent in the last five weeks. The seven-day average of daily new cases has increased from none or 1 before June to more than 40 in early July. Starr County Memorial Hospital had no COVID-19 patients until late June. Last week there were 10; as of this weekend, the hospital beds were full, according to county officials. Demand for testing is so high that the county is no longer covering the cost of tests for uninsured people, who make up about 30 percent of the population. Dr. Jose Vazquez, the local health authority who is also president of the hospital board, worked from home in recent weeks after testing positive in June.
“We have seen other members of our community dying in the Valley hospitals of this disease,” Vazquez told county and city officials on a Zoom call last week. “We are going to be getting sicker patients here in Starr County and needing the ventilatoria systems and ICU services. … We are not ready for this.”
