Doctors in Texas are pointing out the obvious. As Dr. David Portugal, a cardiologist in Sugarland, Texas said, "Governor Abbott has failed us. A republican state legislature has failed us. These leaders should be held accountable and be asked to explain how they can justify taking actions that are killing their fellow Texans."

Texas school students have racked up more than 50,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in just a couple of weeks, more than a dozen school districts have closed as a result of the disease, and Texas is a leader in child deaths from COVID-19.

Rather than deal with the problem of surging COVID cases, state leaders have spent weeks pushing through controversial bills around abortion, voting restrictions and bail reform while Governor Abbott has been fighting local governments to prevent them from taking actions that would help stop the spread of the disease.

Texas has (had) 29,000,000 people living in the state, and over 13,500 COVID patients currently in hospitals, but at last count they only had 81 pediatric ICU beds available and just a few hundred regular ICU beds.

The surge has led to canceled surgeries, overwhelmed staff and preventable hospitalizations and deaths.

"Doctors and other health care workers see every day how too many Texans are needlessly getting sick, including many children when we know this disease can be prevented," said Dr. Elena Jimenez-Gutierrez, an internal medicine physician in San Antonio.

Five mortuary trailers were dispatched to San Antonio because the morgues in hospitals across the state had run out of room. Although someone was thinking ahead to make sure there was enough room for the bodies that are piling up, thinking ahead to keep people from dying in the first place was not one of the options considered by the state government.

“The fact is, the state is planning that more people are going to die of COVID. So much so that they anticipate local hospitals across the state are not going to be able to handle the amount of death they are going to see,” said San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg.

Eight counties across the state are using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of the dead. Bell County has requested a second FEMA trailer with an extra storage capacity for 50 bodies. The Texas Funeral Directors Association donated several smaller refrigerated trailers for stacking corpses.

We can slow the virus down and reduce the load on hospitals by masking up and keeping socially distant, but to get things back to normal more people will need to get vaccinated. Right now only 48.5% of Texans are fully vaccinated, and since 99.5% of the people now dying from COVID-19 are unvaccinated, a lot more Texans are going to die before the remaining 51.5% figure out that getting a jab will keep them off the slab.

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fabuloso@pigdog.org