“I announce to you a difficult decision, but one based on science,” he said just after beginning the broadcast that had interrupted normal local television programming. “Dallas County will move to a safer-at-home order, this is also known as a shelter-in-place order.”
Sitting in his office three years after that dramatic day, Lewis Jenkins recalls a lot about how hectic life was during Dallas County’s response to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His announcement of the order made the coronavirus go from a foreign news topic on television to a major player in living rooms across North Texas.
“I remember the speed of it,” Lewis Jenkins says about the week leading up to his order announcement. “I remember the very first order was ‘Hey, we’re not going to congregate in groups higher than a few hundred.’ And then the next thing we know, it was, ‘Guys, we need to close in-person dining.’ Then it sped up really quickly to the shelter-in-place order.”
Indeed, things progressed quickly. Annual March festivities, including the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, the South by Southwest music conference in Austin and even Dallas’ storied Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Parade were deleted from the calendar in rather swift fashion after an increase in COVID-19 cases began being reported in the United States during the first couple of weeks of March. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
“With everything going on then, it was a somber time,” he remembers when asked about his state of mind on that Sunday night. “We were having very weighty discussions. I haven’t looked back at the press coverage, but I’m sure I was somber. And a little sleep-deprived.”
The headlines from the day he issued the shelter-in-place order explain why Lewis Jenkins had gone without much sleep in the days prior. The front page of The Dallas Morning News on March 22, 2020, was packed with timely headlines including “A Million Could Lose Jobs as Texas Eateries’ Tables Go Empty,” and “Sick Texans Waiting on Tests.” A couple of days before, the Observer ran an article about a Dallas police officer who had tested positive for the coronavirus, something that felt life or death at the time, because for many, such a diagnosis in those days was life-threatening.
"Early on I was told by friends at the CDC that they couldn't talk to me about certain things, like what their research said about keeping people safe." – Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins
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During his press conference remarks, Lewis Jenkins discussed the importance of “flattening the curve.” He used visual aids to show projections for how possible numbers of county COVID-19 cases might compare with the number of available hospital beds. “Flatten the curve” was one of the more prominent new additions to the popular vernacular in the spring of 2020. Seemingly out of nowhere, terms such as “contactless delivery,” “PPE,” “remote learning” and “livestream concert” became common.
Opinions on Wuhan markets, toilet paper supply and whether hair salons should be open were hot debate topics long before all-things COVID vaccine took its lofty spot atop the sociopolitical divide. With bars, movie theaters and gyms closed, pro sports leagues inactive and concerts pushed into the virtual realm only, time for cable news-fueled online debate was more than plentiful.
Lewis Jenkins was also often a topic of debate. As county judge, he became a bit of a political lightning rod, not unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. As a Democrat who oversaw the closing of certain businesses and gatherings, the county judge was a frequent target of Texas conservatives who claimed the government was overreaching to control the spread of the virus.
The judge says that since the start of the pandemic he could have tweeted a “a picture of a puppy or something, and I’ll get 20 or 30 responses that say ‘If that’s your puppy, I hope it dies.’”
On the other side of the coin, however, as March 2020 rolled on, Lewis Jenkins didn’t mind expressing his opinions on the Republican leadership’s COVID response either. He still doesn’t mind doing so three years later.
Lewis Jenkins remembers that during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 he and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, presented a united front that he says was received largely as a “bipartisan, non-politicized thing.” But by 2020 the climate was different, a climate that Lewis Jenkins says was fostered by both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and by the president at the time, Donald Trump.
“That [bipartisan collaboration] was really lacking early on,” he says. “And I think that started with the president. Early on I was told by friends at the CDC that they couldn't talk to me about certain things, like what their research said about keeping people safe, but we were able to work around that. But early on that was a challenge, and things kept getting more political.”
Perhaps the most attention-grabbing political debate during the early part of the pandemic in North Texas involved a hair salon owner named Shelley Luther. Lewis Jenkins says that Luther's decision to keep her salon open in defiance of orders to close it gave residents a prime chance to pick sides, especially after the president and governor got involved.
“Trump tweeted at him and Abbott just turned to jelly,” Lewis Jenkins says. “It became political then, and people were like, ‘By God, haircuts are important, and I don’t care about this public health emergency.’ Obviously it was financially detrimental to have businesses close, but you had people picking sides and looking for science that said to do something different than what the doctors at Baylor, UT Southwestern or the CDC were saying. There was a schism that’s still there today.”
To avoid getting bogged down in the bad news of the day, Lewis Jenkins encouraged his team to spend at least 15 minutes each morning doing something to center themselves. Meditating, praying, dog-walking or yoga — anything that would take their mind off the day-to-day tasks ahead. The judge also implemented what he calls a “buddy system,” where each person on his team had two other people checking in on them to make sure they were doing OK and getting enough sleep."I had a clarity that maybe isn't always there when you’re deciding where to hang a picture in your office.” – Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins
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The working hours of the day and night would offer plenty of time to get into the arguments, decisions and developments of the pandemic. Having the final say on if and when a county of more than 2.5 million people would go under a shelter-in-place order is something Lewis Jenkins wanted supreme coherence for.
“It was kind of weird, you know, I make decisions every day in the job that I have, but not decisions like that,” he says. “When the decisions are literally life and death situation decisions every few minutes, maybe it was the adrenaline that kicked in or something, but I had a clarity that maybe isn't always there when you’re deciding where to hang a picture in your office.”
Lewis Jenkins admits that there are plenty of things he can look back on and know he would do differently should the need arise again. He says anyone who thinks they did everything perfect under such circumstances is “delusional.” He’s proud of the times he and his team had to pivot or improvise, including the time, he says, he reached out to Tito’s Vodka in Austin to manufacture much-needed hand sanitizer.
As impactful of a decision as it was to issue the shelter-in-place order, Lewis Jenkins had already decided how he would know it was time to hand the order down. Three years later, his decision-making process seems almost too simple, but there was nothing simple about March 2020.
“I always had a level of certainty that we would follow science wherever it leads, that there's infectious disease doctors and public health professionals who've trained their entire adult lives to advise us in these moments,” he says. “And so we were looking at evidence coming in and then acting aggressively on that evidence, rather than what Gov. Abbott did for the state 11 days after we did it here. Tarrant County and Denton County and the surrounding counties did it right after we did it, so somebody had to go first, right?”
