LUBBOCK, Texas – For a time, it seemed that the coronavirus had saved West Texas. The cases were low. Few had died. The concern during the spring centered on getting businesses to run again.
In mid-June, the Texas Tech soccer team returned to campus. Local baseball tournaments were resumed. Full hotels.
Then people started to get sick.
In Lubbock, a burned-out tan city of 250,000 with a college bar scene, more people tested positive for the virus in the past three weeks than in the previous three months combined. The day that Governor Greg Abbott began to quickly reopen the state two months ago, the city recorded eight positive tests for the virus. On Wednesday there were 184.
The sudden jump, concentrated among those in their 20s, reflected a sudden and uncontrolled increase in the virus that has affected Texas more than in many other parts of the country. Unlike in the first weeks of the pandemic, when infections were concentrated in the state’s mostly liberal cities, the virus has now reached deep red regions of the state that have resisted aggressive regulation of public health.
However, for many conservatives, even those with the virus now on their doorstep, the resurgence has not changed opinions as much as it has hardened them.
For those Texans, trust in the government disappeared, if it was there to begin with, and that includes some of the state’s top leaders. On Tuesday, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas declared himself tired of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease doctor. “I don’t need your advice anymore,” Patrick said.
That sentiment echoed outside a newly opened popular burger restaurant in Wolfforth, Texas, just outside Lubbock, where even Mr. Abbott, a Republican, received harsh criticism. “It appears that he has been influenced by Fauci and the left,” said Mark Stewart, who sat down with his wife and children and several other families at a gathering for locals studying at home.
None in the group of 18 people, who moved around several outside tables, wore masks or tried to stay distant. “This is the first time we have met and we don’t care,” said Mr. Stewart’s wife, Tamera, adding that other people can take precautions when they are together and stay away. “Texas has all kinds. But we’re done with all of that. “
Such attitudes present a daunting challenge for local leaders trying to contain a resurgent outbreak, especially in solidly Republican areas, where mandatory public health measures can generate rapid opposition.
And they could complicate a governor’s order, issued Thursday night, requiring Texans to wear face covers in public, with few exceptions, or to be fined up to $ 250. The order applies to counties with more than 20 positive cases, in other words, most of the state.
It’s the kind of requirement that Lubbock’s conservative mayor Dan Pope, an eighth-generation Texan, tried to avoid imposing himself, choosing to urge compliance with his avowedly independent constituents.
“My approach has always been one of personal responsibility,” Pope said in an interview from a conference room on the ground floor of the city’s new municipal building. He said, however, he would enforce the Governor’s mask order.
The mayor, wearing a Lubbock-branded black face mask, was working outside the conference room, rather than his 11th-floor office, because his adult daughter living in the city had recently tested positive for the coronavirus. Her younger brother had also been infected, he said.
“I’m clean when it comes to our health department, I just think very carefully: I don’t want to be the type,” said Pope. “I ask our people to act in this way. Why wouldn’t I act the same way?
That message is commonly heard by conservatives in Texas when they seek to balance public health concerns with concerns that an aggressive government response could result in a backlash. The mandates have been associated with the demands of leaders of the largely democratic cities of the state.
In the Houston area, the county’s chief executive, Lina Hidalgo, has called for a new, stricter order to stay home. Several other county leaders from major metropolitan areas, all Democrats, have also urged Governor Abbott to grant them the power to impose local blockades. So far it has been denied.
But that has not won Abbott’s support on the right. Instead, many conservatives have vigorously criticized Abbott’s steps, such as closing bars and limiting restaurant service, as well as the mask requirement, in response to the large increase in cases.
“There is a lot of frustration because the governor is not giving our nation a worldview contrasted with that of California or New York,” said Luke Macías, a conservative Republican political consultant in Texas who said Abbott had not offered a conservative vision of How to deal with the crisis. “With Abbott, he tried to get his cake and eat it too; He doesn’t want to protect your individual freedom and then say it is. “
Prior to Mr. Abbott’s latest order, mayors in West Texas had blocked efforts to require residents to wear masks inside stores, in some cases linking their opposition to disgust with leaders in Austin and Washington.
“Free Americans and free Texans must not allow a light, divided and politically motivated body of values to dictate everyday life,” Midland Mayor Patrick Payton said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Gabrielle Ellison was elated to hear that message. Ms Ellison owns Big Daddy Zane’s, a bar in Odessa that garnered national attention in May after she joined other businesses in Texas and, aided by men carrying assault rifles, reopened in defiance of state restrictions. .
Mrs. Ellison said she was defying the state order again and was keeping her bar open. It has joined a state lawsuit over the governor’s closings.
“For me that is a life and death situation,” he said. “I cannot feed my family. My waiters cannot feed their families. “
If anything, she said, the aggressive growth of coronavirus cases in Odessa made her more confident to reopen. “It has affected her in a more positive way,” she said. “We are making people survive,” she said, adding: “Let this take its course.”
In Lubbock, the closure of bars left a generally bustling strip near the Texas Tech campus devoid of all activity on Wednesday night, even as parking lots were filled outside gyms in other parts of the city. Several local bars have said they will not reopen.
The city is deep in Trump’s country: The president won here with 66 percent of the vote, but it is also a university city. The mayor observed that the family income is lower than the state average, while the number of people with university degrees is higher.
“We are some of the nicest people in the world,” said Jason Corley, a conservative who beat up a more moderate Republican to become Lubbock County Commissioner. “But as soon as you make demands and tell them they are going to do something, you get a different answer: You can’t tell me what to do.”
About a third of the city’s residents are Hispanic, according to census figures, and that community has seen about a third of the city’s total number of coronavirus cases. Authorities said they were still unable to provide a demographic breakdown of the recent wave of cases, which have now totaled more than 1,700 since June 15.
While many residents expressed confidence that they would not become infected, others were more concerned.
Michael Machuca, 29, said he was concerned about the spread of the virus among warehouse staff where he works. “The entire night shift didn’t show up one day,” he said, as he and his 6-year-old son searched for bass in a local park.
The focus in the bars was due in part to what city contact trackers learned about the outbreak in their interviews with infected youth, said Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health.
Still, getting people to self-quarantine has been a challenge, he said. And since then the virus has spread more widely to the community, reappearing in at least one nursing home.
The return of the virus to nursing homes has been particularly demoralizing: Most of the city’s 52 deaths have occurred at those facilities, but city leaders believed they had eliminated that part of the outbreak early in late April.
While the Texas Tech campus remains closed, many student athletes returned to practice in mid-June. On the soccer team alone, 23 players and staff tested positive for the virus, a school spokesman said, adding that they had all recovered.
“When the governor opened the bars, the floodgates opened,” said Latrelle Joy, a member of the City Council. “We are now in a position where those bars have closed, but we have spread into the community.”
With the closings, the gatherings had changed from bars to pool parties during the day and house parties at night, authorities said. The cases have now been traced back to those meetings.
Despite the increase in infections among young people, before the new mask order this week, many chose not to wear a mask. Or let it slip from your mind.
“I left mine in the car,” said Ambroshia Pollard, 29, as she was leaving a grocery store with her mother and one-month-old daughter. Still, she said, she took the virus seriously. “My brother’s friend understood. He is young, 21 years old, “said Pollard. “I feel like it’s real and people should be more aware. We, too, should have masks.
But many of his fellow shoppers also came and went without them, as did diners at a Braum’s Ice Cream and Burger restaurant in Wolfforth, and drinkers at Brewery LBK in downtown Lubbock. There, groups of friends gathered around beers and cigarettes in the yard and discussed the usefulness of the governor’s mask order shortly after its publication.
It is not a mask in sight.
