There’s a crisis within the coronavirus crisis hitting hospitals and medical facilities around the country. Personal protective equipment — the gloves, masks and gowns needed to protect front-line healthcare workers — is in short supply in many U.S. hospitals. Private companies and nonprofits are pitching in, trying to get the…
Nothing about this is new. Almost to the letter, the coronavirus crisis today repeats the entire history of pandemics, some aspects of which, like deciding who gets expelled and banished, never get easy. In the spring of 1348, when the rodent-borne Black Plague was decimating a third to half the…
Like many people, Rachael Wilkins has spent a lot of time lately reading the news and feeling like things are spinning out of control. The number of reported cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, ticks up each day, both nationwide and in North Texas. Schools are…
If you’re looking for some normalcy during the novel coronavirus pandemic, here it is: Texas, now as has been for the last decade, is getting sued over an abortion restriction. This time, no big surprise, it’s Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on all abortions that don’t save the would-be mother’s life,…
More than 155,000 Texans filed for unemployment last week as businesses across the state shut down as a part of a massive public health effort to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. That total, which was reported Thursday morning by the U.S. Department of Labor, is equal to about…
Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown said her office had been preparing for months for the news it got Wednesday morning. Procedures were in place, she said, to deal with the positive coronavirus test that hit the Dallas County jail. “For the past two weeks, we have received numerous inquiries regarding…
Wait. Wait. Texas does not have to do a total, forever Fauci-style face-plant over Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. There is a respectable, even noble way out of this for us. True, it’s bad. Last week Patrick earned worldwide opprobrium for himself and terrible attention for Texas with what he said…
Three students at Southern Methodist University have tested positive for COVID-19, university officials said Wednesday. The students tested positive for the disease, which is caused by the novel coronavirus, after leaving the area for spring break, SMU President R. Gerald Turner said in a letter to students and faculty Thursday…
An inmate at the Dallas County Jail has tested positive for the coronavirus, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday morning. The inmate is no longer housed at the jail, according to the sheriff’s department. No further information was immediately available about how the person who tested positive came in…
The thought is a lot like the novel coronavirus itself. Dangerous, malicious and hard to stymie. The coronavirus isn’t that bad, it starts out. It’s just another kind of flu, maybe a little nasty, but not that dangerous. It’s ridiculous that we’re all having to stay inside. You hear it…
Coronavirus isn’t the real threat to the American economy. At least, not according to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The real threat to the American economy is Granny. Your granny, our grannies, everybody’s granny. If they’d just stop being so sensitive, we could all go back outside, according to the…
Tarrant and Collin counties issued their own shelter-in-place orders Tuesday morning. Tarrant County’s is lot like Dallas County’s. Collin County’s has a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through. Dallas and Tarrant counties’ orders require residents to stay home unless they are working at an essential business.
Classrooms at colleges and universities across North Texas sat empty Monday as students returned from spring break and resumed their classes from home. College campuses across Texas and nationwide are shut down, some for a few weeks and others through the end of the semester, in an effort to contain…
Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t say anything about it last week, when he announced his ban on elective medical procedures, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made it clear Monday afternoon — abortion is banned in Texas until, at the earliest, April 3. Before the novel coronavirus pandemic, anyone seeking an…
According to one expert, the grocery store shortages in produce and frozen food are easing already. Canned goods are coming back, but we may just have to learn to live without toilet paper. OK, he didn’t say the last thing. That’s just me trying to sell newspapers. But he did…
Last Tuesday, Yan Blair was supposed to be visiting a school in a village in the Republic of Georgia, observing teachers there as they walked their students through English lessons. After class, he was supposed to talk to those teachers about how to set up an after-school English language club…
How’s everybody doing? We are, collectively, about a week into a unique experience. The sun’s still — when it isn’t raining at least — coming out. Dallas’ crappy infrastructure is still crappy, but it hasn’t fallen apart. We’re still walking our dogs and getting our kids outside as often as…
Norman Siegel, a prominent New York civil rights lawyer who won a well-publicized victory on Ebola quarantines three years ago, has a new message. This is different. I talked to him last week because his quarantine victory in 2017 had an indirect connection with the 2014 Dallas Ebola scare, which…
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins has ordered all county residents to shelter in place until at least April 3. All nonessential business in the county must close at 11:59 p.m. Monday. “It makes me sick that we are at this point,” Jenkins said. “God-willing, (shelter-at-home) and the mass production of…
Another day under semi-lockdown, another 19 positive tests for the novel coronavirus in Dallas County, according to a breakdown of COVID-19 cases in the county provided Friday by Dallas County Health and Human Services. More evidence, too, that everyone should be staying home as much a possible. According to the…
As the novel coronavirus slowly turns all of our lives into a dreary hellscape, one of the few bits of good news for workers in Texas has been Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to make the state’s byzantine unemployment insurance system a little easier to navigate. It’s about the least he…
There are going to be a lot of notices like this over the coming days. The first of whatever group to be infected with the scourge of 2020, COVID-19. One of Thursday’s firsts is a Dallas Police Department officer. According to the department, an officer working out of the Northeast…
