On a normal evening, before social distancing was a thing, a class size at the YogaStand would have held a dozen or so students. But once the coronavirus hit Lubbock, attendance dwindled to a single student. Eventually classes were cancelled. Now they’ve moved to strictly virtual session. Haley Bevers, the owner of the YogaStand in Lubbock, shares what this transition has been like for her.
“I’m kind of being forced into starting an online business, which I’m fortunate, a lot of businesses can’t even do that,” she says. “It’s almost like I’m launching another business within a business when I don’t have the time or resources and wasn’t even ready for it.”
That’s Haley Bevers, the owner of the Yoga Stand. She estimates that 90 percent of the studios she knows are scrambling to get recordings out to their students. Not only does this model help save membership, but it also provides their students with some much-needed yoga during this period of isolation.
Bevers explains, “Helping people get their mind right, right now is very important because there’s legitimate true fear going on.”
We’ve been hearing the phrase flattening the curve now for weeks. If you don’t know what that means, Katherine Wells, the director of public health here in Lubbock, gives us a quick rundown.
“The thing is, if we get a lot of people exposed very quickly, we’re going to end up with a huge increase in disease all at the same time. If we can slow that disease spread so we don’t end up with too many people sick at one time, we won’t overburden our healthcare system.”
And while this period of isolation may be frustrating to many, especially small businesses, the good news is that if we are good about it, Lubbock is in pretty decent shape to handle this. Dr. Craig Rhyne, the chief medical officer of Covenant Health system, gave an overview of what their capacity looks like.
“We have about 80 total ventilators in the covenant health system,” he says. “We have 60 plus anesthesia machines and the total number of ICU beds is 137 ICU beds at Covenant. So, we have lots of capacity. We can be flexible…I would say that we probably are in really good shape. The majority of hospitals don’t have anywhere near that kind of reserve.”
Wells and others we have talked to agree that the city has handled this situation well. But now, a lot of this is in the community’s hands. And that feeds Well’s biggest concern.
“For the community it’s really getting people to take this seriously,” Wells says. “This is kind of the beginning of it, but we really want to work on containment and reduce the risk of contracting this disease to as many people as possible because we don’t want to get to a point where we would overwhelm our healthcare system. And that’s both for Lubbock and the surrounding communities that also feed into UMC and Covenant.”
