thomas leverett weblog

Blowing Off the Covid

I don't tell everyone this, but I'm still an employee (part time) of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, as a writing lab tutor. We moved from Lubbock four years ago, and I'm grateful, though I still love the place. Texas Tech has become the model of the conservative approach to COVID.

That is, they go on living life as if it wasn't around. Thirty-five thousand (?) students come back to campus and are asked to wear masks, and maybe some do. Most go around spreading the virus as kids will do. Enforcement of any distancing or masks is half-hearted. Now I'm not totally sure of this, because as I've said, I've left town. But I know that Lubbock is swamped, the hospitals are full, and it's out of control.

One aspect of it is that Lubbock has a winter, unlike most of Texas. The wind blows, and it gets cold, and it actually snows sometimes, and people go indoors a lot.

One friend of mine has a partner who had a fall and had internal bleeding, but it took her a few hours to get a room. They know what to do with her - Lubbock has good hospitals - but they had no space. My friend was furious. The hospital is full of people who ignored the COVID.

The other friend actually got the COVID. He works in the President's office, which makes it kind of like the COVID ravaging the White House. If one person got it, in an atmosphere where people don't wear masks, or tend to spread it, there you go. Of course I have no idea if he got it there. He's also in contact with all the sports teams - he's a kind of pr guy - so he gets around quite a bit. You would think the university would circle its wagons, so to speak, take care of its own, shut down, or at least limit movement and activity. Well it did, a little, some would argue - as they had a social distancing football season (whereas some schools had no football season at all). Well as I've said, I don't really know how they're handling it.

But the St. John's basketball team was due to come to Texas to play a game, and just canceled it out. Too risky. Here they are, coming from urban Philly, or some such place, and Texas just seems to be too rife with the disease. You reach a point where you don't want to do anything risky, and basketball and driving are included here, because there are no hospital beds. You get hurt, you sit in a hallway with infected people who can't get a room. Better to just stay home and lay low.

I think about this partly because I've moved to the high mountains of New Mexico, where we have about a person per acre, and lots of fresh air and sunshine. We have inconvenience - if we do have to go to a hospital, it's about an hour away, and it's just as full as Lubbock's. But we can step out our front door, breathe the fresh air, and be sure that the deer and elk didn't bring it to us from across the valley. Our biggest problem is getting our kids to school.

Because we aren't blowing off the COVID.

posted by tom @ 7:36 AM