'Small Town, No Hospital': COVID-19 Is Overwhelming Rural West Texas

United States Headlines News

ALPINE, Texas -- It is one of the fastest-growing coronavirus hot spots in the nation, but there are no long lines of cars piled up for drive-thru testing and no rush of appointments to get swabbed at CVS.That's because in the rugged, rural expanse of far West Texas, there is no county health department to conduct daily testing and no CVS store for more than 100 miles. A handful of clinics offer testing to those who are able to make an appointment.Out past the seesawing oil pumpjacks of Midland and Odessa, where roadrunners flit across two-lane roads and desert shrubs freckle the long, beige horizon, the Big Bend region of Texas is one of the most remote parts of the mainland United States and one of the least equipped to handle an infectious disease outbreak. There is just one hospital for 12,000 square miles and no heart or lung specialists to treat serious cases of COVID-19.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesBut in a sign that the virus is surging nearly everywhere, the counties that include Big Bend ranked among the top 20 in the nation last week for the most new cases per capita.Big Bend, best known for its sprawling national park and the artist town of Marfa, offers an extreme example of the danger playing out across the United States, as the virus blazes more widely and furiously than ever before, driving deaths to levels not seen since the spring and thrusting many places into crisis at the same time. From California to Texas to Mississippi, hospitals are filling up, and health officials in rural communities increasingly fear that they are on their own.'There is no neurologist; there is no long-term care specialist,' said Dr. J.P. Schwartz, the health authority in Big Bend's Presidio County and a physician at a local clinic. 'We have no care to help them whatsoever. There is not even a nursing home out here.'Even as hospitalizations and deaths in Texas near their summer peaks, local officials fear they have little power to intervene be