Lubbock took its first step in reopening the city on May 1. The executive order came down from the governor’s office on April 27, a day before Lubbock’s Economic Recovery Task Force was slated to present their recommendations for safely re-opening the city to Lubbock’s city council. While this move doesn’t lift all restrictions, it’s still unsettling to some. One nurse, who we will refer to as Lily, shared some of her fears for Lubbock’s healthcare system.
“I definitely had like a total meltdown a couple days ago where I just cried all night,” she recalls. Her main hesitation is for the strain her hospital is already seeing, even though they haven’t seen a large number of coronavirus cases. “It’s definitely already really wearing on the nursing staff and the equipment and stuff like that and I feel like those numbers are just going to skyrocket after we open up.”
On April 27, Governor Greg Abbott issued an order to begin the first phase of re-opening Texas while minimizing the spread of COVID-19. Under this order, among other regulations, restaurants, shopping malls and other retail stores can open for business. However, they must adhere to a 25 percent occupancy limit. In a press conference the following day, Lubbock Mayor, Dan Pope, made the statement, “It’s like he took the keys from us yesterday.”
A week prior to the executive order, Lubbock had formed the Lubbock Economic Recovery Task Force—a group of 22 community members, tasked with devising a safe and efficient way to reopen the city. While the governor’s orders didn’t completely contradict the group’s anticipated suggestions, it does make it difficult to enforce actions like requiring employees to wear facial coverings.
“There’s some stuff that the governor implemented that makes me quiver,” council member Shelia Patterson Harris said during the city council meeting. “I say we move forward and try to get out of this thing and be mindful.” The city and the task force are hopeful that the implementation of the Lubbock Safe program will encourage businesses to adopt the regulations the city had intended to set in place. Local businesses can sign up for the program online, where they will receive a set of safety guidelines they must adhere to in order to receive a sticker recognizing them as part of the program. This is intended to help patrons identify businesses that are dedicated to their health and safety.
Lily, however, doesn’t have much trust in the public to act responsibly now that regulations are starting to relax. Out of fear of receiving backlash for speaking out, Lily asked that we not use her real name in this piece. She’s a nurse anesthetist and although she hasn’t worked with any COVID positive patients—as far as she knows—she’s definitely felt the weight of the pandemic in her workload.
She explains that for anesthesia, they rely on both nurse anesthetists and resident anesthesiologist cover cases. “Once we went into this stay at home order, they decided to pull the residents to help cover in the ICUs.” As a result, the nurse anesthetists have been left to cover all 24 hour shifts now. Normally the residents would handle night shifts and weekends. And this is possibly just the beginning.
In two weeks when the hospitals open back up for elective surgeries, they’ll be working longer hours than usual just to cover the backlog of cases that have piled up. One thing that’s been a major cause for concern and frustration to has been witnessing people not following social distancing orders. “I feel like people are just so tired of being restricted, even a little bit for the last month, that they’re just going to go crazy.” She says that even throughout the past two months she’s witness large gatherings of people.
Dr. Craig Rhyne, the chief medical officer at Covenant Health System, is hopeful that Lubbock will be able to open while keeping the COVID cases down. But he warns, “One thing that we need to continue to do is maintain that social distance.” He recommends that if people do go out in public that they wear facial coverings.
“We will be watching those [cases] very carefully as the city starts to open back up to determine if that opening creates a sudden recurrent increase in the number of positive tested cases or ICU admissions,” he says.
As restrictions begin to ease up, Lily wants to remind everyone that there’s still a lot about the coronavirus we don’t know yet. “We still don’t know if you can get infected a second time,” she says. For that reason, she plans to practice social distancing until we learn more about what we’re living with.
