LAREDO, Texas – Every day around 6pm Dr Ricardo Cigarroa undergoes the same gloomy ritual. He sits at his desk and counts the dead.
“Five to seven deaths, that’s how much I sign every day,” said Dr. Cigarroa, a 62-year-old cardiologist, said while stacking up one afternoon after the paperwork. “It’s only getting worse.”
During the deadliest month of the pandemic, Laredo showed the darkest distinction of having the worst outbreak of any city in the United States in the past two weeks. As matters rise, the death toll in the overwhelming 277,000 Latino city now stands at more than 630 – including at least 126 in January alone.
When the virus was on its way to the borderlands almost a year ago, the brilliant dr. Cigarroa just chopped off. He was able to focus on his lucrative cardiology practice, with 80 employees. He could keep quiet.
Instead, dr. Cigarroa became the largest crusader and de facto authority over the pandemic along this stretch of border with Mexico.
On local television stations, he calmly explains in his baritone voice, both in English and Spanish, how the virus develops. He is known for making Covid-19 home calls around Laredo in his old Toyota Tacoma pickup. He is interviewed so often that Texas Monthly tells him ‘The Dr. Fauci of South Texas’, and compares him to dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top expert in infectious diseases – although he has no official government portfolio.
Lately, Doctor Cigarroa is losing his temper.
He looks exhausted in a video posted on Facebook and exploded political leaders for allowing the virus to run amok through this part of South Texas. Dr. Cigarroa singled out Republican Gov. Greg Abbott because he refused to allow Laredo to impose stricter mitigation measures.
“To the governor: it is good to swallow your pride,” said Dr. Cigarroa said. He stunned some viewers with a warning that by the middle of the year, the virus could kill 1 in 250 Laredoans. “It’s OK to say you’re not going to do it, and then to save lives.”
He pleaded with Laredo residents to consider civil disobedience in the form of staying home if politicians do not act, adding: ‘The only thing that will save lives at this stage is to stay home and leave the city. to close. ‘
But his battle is not just with the governor: Although the city is 95 percent Latino, a group that has suffered an exorbitant number of cases and deaths, many local leaders have been reluctant to close businesses, and some are flocking to the general public. still to pubs, restaurants and holiday gatherings.
The Republicans who dominate state-level politics in Texas seem unaffected by calls for more regulations. Mr. Abbott reversed the occupation at pubs and restaurants and imposed a mask mandate in most of the state. But he said in November that he did not rule out “no more locks”, determined to keep Texas, even parts of the state, faltering under the effects of the virus, open to business.
“Increased restrictions will do nothing to mitigate Covid-19 and protect communities without enforcement,” said Renae Eze, a spokeswoman for the governor, on requests for stricter restrictions in Laredo.
She said the policy regarding restaurant and bar occupancy and face masks, adopted after consultation with medical experts, was effective in slowing the spread of the virus during the summer. And they can also work, she argued, in communities that have experienced spikes over the past few weeks. “They can keep working, but only if applied,” she said.
Her implication – and dr. Cigarroa concedes that this is not entirely wrong – was that local officials were not aggressive enough to hold business owners and members of the public accountable for complying with the limited social distance measures. But dr. Cigarroa said a “strong leader” was needed to lead cities through the crisis.
Around Laredo step dr. Cigarroa sometimes in the void. Earlier in the pandemic, he said he confronted members of a local cycling club who had gathered at a taqueria after a long ride. “I do not know why you took the trouble to take a 40-mile ride on your bike to stay healthy,” he told them as he told the story. “You’re sitting here without masks, and I promise you that within a month there will be some of your Covid and that they may intubate.”
Dr Cigarroa said he had “no problem telling people to protect themselves.” But he stressed that Laredoans got much better at wearing masks as the crisis got worse.
Yet not everyone has the same sense of urgency. Hundreds of families mourn loved ones, while chain restaurants such as Olive Garden and IHOP continue to indulge in indoor dining.
Bars stay open for business, and the parking lots of stores like Walmart, Target and HEB, a grocery chain, bulge with cars. Some enforcement orders, such as the city’s termination in January to temporarily shut down two popular pubs found by secret police officers as violating Covid-19 restrictions, have angered local businesses.
The rising death toll has exposed the vulnerability of a city that is not only a savage hub for cross-border trade, but also a place where many people are at risk due to conditions such as diabetes and obesity. Several generations often live in the same house in Laredo, which limits the social distance.
Similar challenges exist across the border in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, where Dr. Cigarroa also makes occasional home visits. He said cartel members there had begun to control the trade in oxygen tanks. “Dr Cigarroa has said that some Nuevo Laredo families are urging doctors to list pneumonia instead of Covid-19 as the cause of death so that they can draw up regulations banning family members from attending Covid-19 funerals.” a phenomenon that according to him contributes. to a subset of the pandemic’s toll along the border.
Sergio Mora, host of Laredo’s political podcast Frontera Radio, said the crisis hit recently when he lost two people near him in a matter of days – a valued longtime employee at his family’s towing company over the border in Nuevo. Laredo, and his grandmother.
“Dr. Cigarroa is a respected voice ringing outside the alarm bells,” said Mora. “People just have to listen.”
Agitation against the spread of the virus comes naturally to Dr. Cigarroa, a fourth-generation Mexican-American whose family forged one of Texas’ most remarkable medical dynasties.
Both Drs. Cigarroa’s father and uncle were influential doctors who led the effort to bring Texas A&M International University to Laredo at a time when government officials thought the city could not support a four-year university.
Two of the brothers and sisters of dr. Cigarroa, born into a family of ten children, is a nurse and three doctors, including his brother, Francisco, a transplant surgeon and former chancellor of the University of Texas. Dr Cigarroa’s son, also a doctor, now practices in the same cardiology clinic as him.
When Laredo’s hospitals began to struggle with the influx of coronavirus patients, dr. Cigarroa, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, took the unconventional step of transforming his practice into a temporary Covid-19 clinic.
Every night after dr. Cigarroa has signed death certificates, patients from all over Laredo flock to the clinic where they are diagnosed, treated and sometimes immediately admitted to the hospital in an adjacent part of the medical complex.
Many are not insured, but dr. Cigarroa treats them anyway. He said his goal during the pandemic was not to make a profit, but to stay financially afloat while paying his employees’ salaries.
The daily grinding of such a routine takes its own toll. In July, dr. Cigarroa himself came down with Covid-19. At first he thought it would be a case of relatively light “corona light” and he chose to rest at home for a few days.
But then he woke up short of breath, in panic. Taking into account his thoughts, dr. Cigarroa said the deaths were two days earlier of two doctors in Nuevo Laredo who contracted the virus.
He was wary of using one of Laredo’s last remaining doses of inhibitor, the antiviral drug used to treat Covid-19, and chose to take him to the University Hospital of San Antonio, where his brother had a doctor is.
“I went down like a dog bathing to the moon,” said Dr. Cigarroa said. “I was a little sensitive before that. I got a much better doctor back. ‘
After recovering from an intense attack by Covid-19, dr. Cigarroa went back to work and treated patients while doubling his efforts to educate the public about the pandemic. Although the recent arrival of vaccines has sparked some hope, he is demanding answers as to why Webb County, Laredo’s home, is still getting so hard.
In the interview in his office, dr. Cigarroa questions whether racism was a factor in dealing with the crisis in Texas. He asked why Republican government officials have allocated much more vaccine doses in recent weeks to a country like Lubbock, which has a population comparable to that of Webb County but is relatively less Latino.
“Is it back to MALDEF and discrimination?” Dr. Cigarroa asked, citing the long-established racism in Texas that has forced state attorneys to establish a pioneering civil rights organization, the Mexican American Fund for Legal Defense and Education.
One reason for the lower allocation may be that Laredo has thousands of fewer health workers targeted at the early vaccination rounds than Lubbock suggests, according to some local authorities.
Dr Cigarroa said the state’s “total disorganization” was certainly one of the biggest problems.
So he started a very organized campaign of his own.
His videos pleading for help from government officials are posted on Laredo Contra Covid 19 (Laredo Against Covid-19), a Facebook page his daughter, Alyssa, created when the virus began tearing through the city in 2020. Then Mrs. Cigarroa, a painter involved in urban revitalization projects, offered himself as a candidate for the city council seat.
She sailed to victory in November and ousted an incumbent by taking 84 percent of the vote. In a heated council meeting in January in which members debated replacing Governor Abbott’s relatively lax restrictions – a move that would almost certainly cause a legal battle with the state – Cigarroa asked officials to ask for help from the National Guard. to enhance the distribution of vaccines. in the city.
Dr Cigarroa paused to reflect on how the pandemic was reforming life along the border, beaming for a moment with pride at the intrusion of his daughter into politics. Then he seemed to remember what they were facing: political leaders as well as some in their own city who still seemed uncertain about the biggest threat – the virus, or the loss of a semblance of normality and a way of to make a living.
Dr Cigarroa made it his mission to make sure they understood what was at stake.
“This virus will continue to drill and drill until people realize they are not going to have employees,” he said. “Until we make the right decisions, it’s about money versus life.”