“It’s safe to say that things are getting a little strange out there,” read the first line on the front page story of The Monitor’s March 18, 2020 edition.
“Times are a-changin’” read the headline above it.
Folksy lines meant to soften the blow of a 24-page paper that was little short of disturbing.
At the time, the Rio Grande Valley Livestock Show had been abruptly canceled for the first time in 81 years. Local authorities issued disaster declarations prohibiting large gatherings. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, emerged from a two-week quarantine; McAllen Mayor Jim Darling entered one.
(Don’t miss The Monitor’s Year in Photos: 2020)
That paper tried to keep up with a world that seemed to be crumbling before the ink on it had time to dry. Tables and chairs disappeared from restaurants. Business owners wrung their hands. Canadian winter visitors fled back north in droves.
Rio Grande Regional Hospital ran a full page ad in that paper reassuring the public of its preparedness and competence; El Disco Super Center in Progreso Lakes ran one postponing its customer appreciation day slated for that weekend.
The first case of COVID-19 in the Rio Grande Valley would be confirmed the next day, after that March 18 edition had been cleared off countertops at convenience stores and tossed into the dumpster, quickly made obsolete as the world changed.
It’s been 289 days since that paper was printed, and times have a-changed.
WARNING SIGNS
Evidence of the coronavirus’ rapid ascent to the top of the headlines seeped into The Monitor in wire stories from far afield.
The first one was on Jan. 9. Less than 200 words, it was tucked in a corner below a report on a Ukrainian jet crash and an update on Prince Harry’s decoupling from the royal family.
Dozens were sick, it read.
Just 16 days later, the coronavirus got a bigger story from the wire with a picture — 41 were dead by then, victims of a pandemic that wasn’t yet a pandemic. It made it on the front page too, in a local story: customs officials had begun screening travelers for symptoms of the virus.
Those stories were accompanied by skepticism.
One article in that day’s paper proclaimed that “Something far deadlier than Wuhan virus lurks near you,” comparing the coronavirus to the flu and urging people to get flu vaccines.
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was quoted as saying: “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.”
COVID-19 would keep simmering on the inside pages for another month and a half, in news stories about China’s response to the virus and arch cartoons about the havoc it was beginning to wreak. The coronavirus climbed from an outbreak to an epidemic to, finally, a pandemic in those pages as the story found itself more consistently on the front page, alongside articles about a website calling McAllen the fattest city in America again and reports on the livestock show.
By March 18, it didn’t matter what else was in the paper; the pandemic was the only story that mattered. Store shelves emptied. Soviet-esque milk lines formed at the H-E-B on Fern in McAllen, running parallel to a shelf that no longer had any toilet paper on it. Wild rumors spread while local officials tried to thread the needle between getting people to take the virus seriously and avoiding a full-fledged panic.
The first McAllen resident tested positive on Saturday, March 21. She had traveled not long before, like the five new cases in Cameron County reported that day.
Malls and churches closed. Hospitals and nursing homes raised their drawbridges. Bars and border crossings and The Monitor’s lobby were all shuttered by the following Monday.
By the end of the month it was clear the pandemic wouldn’t be restricted to travelers. It was clear that we were in it for the long haul, although it wasn’t clear just how long that would be.
“We know there is a tsunami coming,” Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez said at the end of March. “It hasn’t hit us yet.”
On March 27, a Department of State Health Services representative said there were 72 available ICU beds and 143 ventilators available in the RGV.
That wouldn’t be enough.
A FALSE SPRING
On April 4, the first Valley resident, a Willacy County man in his 60s, died of COVID-19.
A Hidalgo County man died of the virus a few days later.
Students who’d gone home for spring break and never returned to campus tried to salvage the end of their semester with online learning and socially distanced graduations. Still, most of their prom dresses would never be danced in, most of their graduation caps would never be tossed.
Businesses tried to adapt to doing takeout. The faithful went to Mass in spare bedrooms and living rooms, watching their priest on their cellphones.
Deaths would come in ones and twos for the next month, accompanying new cases being reported by the handful.
It was tragic, but not the apocalypse.
By early May restaurants reopened. By mid-May, bars reopened. All in line with a state-mandated reopening in phases.
It looked like that strange pandemic hibernation the Valley went into in April was over. But it was a false spring.
Cases started coming in by the dozen in June, then by the score, and finally by the hundred.
By the end of June, hospital heads and local leaders were asking — pleading with — the public to stay home and take pandemic precautions seriously.
By mid-July, dozens were dying. Out of hospital beds, Starr County was considering airlifting COVID-19 patients to New York for treatment.
Local hospitals were requesting staff, ventilators, ambulances, body bags and all sorts of other supplies from the state.
Hundreds were hospitalized with the virus as hospitals desperately converted wings into pandemic wards, alien and sterile places where hundreds died away from their kith and kin.
More obituaries and death notices ran in this newspaper than at any other time in living memory. Bodies piled up in funeral homes and in refrigerated trailers, grandmothers and grandfathers dying faster than their bodies could be burned or buried.
A group of Pentecostals began traveling to hospitals in McAllen and the courthouse, speaking in tongues and sounding shofars in prayer for healers and the sick. Signs and wonders.
The pandemic wasn’t the only story competing for Valley headlines over the summer. Two McAllen police officers were shot and killed in what the police chief called an ambush. Hundreds-strong protests following the killing of George Floyd marched through the streets of McAllen and Edinburg and Harlingen and Brownsville. Hurricane Hanna knocked out power to thousands and flooded homes — a family died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator not long after.
The pandemic wasn’t the only story — wasn’t the only tragedy — but it did color all the rest.
The protesters’ chants were muffled by face masks.
You could not read sorrow or grief on the faces of the pall bearers that carried those two McAllen lawmen to their graves. Those men’s eyes were obscured by sunglasses, faces shrouded in cloth.
The homes the hurricane damaged belonged to people who were suffering from the financial repercussions of the pandemic; the food that went bad when their power went out and fridges turned off belonged to a populace that was making record demands at the local food banks.
A news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott after the hurricane was dominated by talk of the pandemic. The McAllen Convention Center would be turned into a makeshift hospital.
HOPE ON THE HORIZON
The convention center hospital never did see much use, having come toward the end of a devastating surge. Cortez’s tsunami had already arrived but subsided, to a degree — although the dismal tide continues to ebb and flow.
For months, the pandemic has continued to claim lives daily, usually by the handful. Nine died in Hidalgo County on Thursday. More will likely die today, and the day after that.
The loss of life isn’t an anomaly or an aberration anymore. That’s what you expect to read over coffee and breakfast every morning now.
But there’s a ray of hope on the horizon: the vaccine arrived in December, just in time for Christmas. Thousands have been vaccinated and tens of thousands more will be vaccinated in the next few months.
Perhaps the end is in sight.
The stock show is planning to resume this year. Canadian winter visitors are looking forward to coming back down next season. Maybe El Disco Super Center will get to hold its long postponed customer appreciation day by mid-March.
Things have stayed strange since that March 18, 2020 edition. They’ve also been tragic and horrifying, heart-rending and mind-numbing.
The Valley is defined by its tragedies as much as it’s defined by its people and its culture and its geography.
The Alton bus crash in 1989 claimed 21 young lives. Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo and the band of cultists that murdered Mark Kilroy in Matamoros in 1989 are believed to have killed 15 in total. In 1967, Hurricane Beulah killed 15 in Texas and 19 in Mexico.
The pilot who flew his plane into the San Juan Basilica 50 years ago was the only casualty.
Since March 18, 289 days ago, 3,646 people in the Rio Grande Valley have died of COVID-19.
A dozen a day — 3,646 neighbors, friends, family, strangers; nurses, teachers, retirees. Most of whose names you’ll never know.
Enough names to fill up twice as much space as this story.
In another 76 days maybe things will be a little less strange out there.
But they certainly won’t be the same.
