Has it really been five years ...

How time flies. It’s already been five years since COVID-19 first rolled into Hidalgo County. Where did the time go?

Students and faculty went on spring break March 16, 2020, and then didn’t return to finish out the year. No one at the time knew that it wouldn’t be until the school year of 2022/2023 until things would finally return to some semblance of normal.

By March 18, 2020, Hidalgo County had placed a ban on gatherings of 50 or more, and there went Pharr’s HubPhest, Weslaco’s Texas Onion Fest, music concerts, the Mercedes Livestock Show.

First Case Arrives

By March 21, Hidalgo County announced the first case of COVID-19, and from there, there was little turning back from a pandemic that would change the way we live for at least the next two years.

By December 2020, the vaccines were ready to be administered, and the lines began to form around health clinics, hospitals, near and far.

The pandemic had already become politicized, however, which just added to the woes in both Texas and across the country, with people fighting over facemasks, the efficacy of the CDC; and to make matters worse, people were still fighting over the results of the November 2020 presidential election.

In fact, in some ways, at least for the general public, facemasks became a political statement. Doctors, nurses, first responders, they wore them because they had seen too much misery, courtesy of the pandemic. Too many people dying.

By the time the COVID vaccines rolled out in late December 2020, Hidalgo County was reporting 2,192 fatalities (Dec. 30). Total confirmed cases — 35,499.

A year later, Dec. 22, 2021, Hidalgo County reported 70,699 confirmed cases and a total number of fatalities of 3,522.

Along the way, apparently the COVID vaccines were working, according to Hidalgo County records:

Total fatalities in 2020 — 2,208.

In 2021: 1,323.

In 2022, it was down to 505 total fatalities for the year.

Crazy Stuff Pops Up

Along the way, some crazy ideas were popping up across the radar.

The people, for example, who wouldn’t take the COVID vaccine, would instead, take an antiparasitic drug used to treat various parasitic infections in both humans and animals — Ivermectin.

Thanks to social media (if it’s on social media, it must be true), misinformation had an easier time of gaining traction on a wide scale, convincing people that the parasite drug was an effective and safe treatment for COVID-19.

YouTube was particularly fascinating in a morbid sort of way.

Married couples, for example, who had a channel about going to garage sales would proudly claim how they didn’t take the vaccine because they thought this whole pandemic thing was overblown and there was nothing to fear but fear itself.

The following week, the couple would be dead from COVID.

These weren’t isolated incidents. The anti-vax crowd, who also chose not to wear a facemask unless absolutely forced to, many of them, were still convinced that people were dying from the flu, not COVID, and this whole pandemic “thing” was one big ruse on the part of the federal government to see whether or not the American public could be easily manipulated.

Crazy times.

Hard to believe it’s been five years this week that the pandemic hit Hidalgo County.

Still, some people suffer from “Long COVID,” where some symptoms have never gone completely away, or there are anomalies that may or may not be associated with one of the COVID vaccines, but for many physicians, the symptoms still look odd, out of place, in a perfectly healthy patient who is only in their 30s.

One last bit of oddity — China never did allow an international team of scientists into Wuhan City or the Wuhan Lab (partly funded with American tax dollars) to try and determine from where the virus originated.

Was it really from a bat, as China claimed, or did it escape from the Wuhan Lab where scientists were studying coronaviruses to try and increase “gain of function.”

That phrase, by the way, “gain of function,” is simply a polite way of saying, “How can we alter this virus’s genetic makeup to make it more lethal to the human race?”

Turns out, with an estimated 1.1 million deaths in the U.S., approximately 7 million around the world, COVID was indeed lethal when compared to the influenza bug, which kills approximately 40,000 to 50,000 per year in the U.S. (Source: CDC.)