CBS 4 News: Curfew coming for El Pasoans as 14 mobile morgues now needed for wave of deaths. “El Paso will be expanding its morgue capacity to 14 mobile morgues and a refrigerated warehouse as the county is now investigating the deaths of nearly 500 El Pasoans for COVID-19.”
Texas
Dallas Morning News: Who’ll get Texas’ first COVID-19 shots? Hospital, nursing home, EMS, home health workers top the list
Dallas Morning News: Who’ll get Texas’ first COVID-19 shots? Hospital, nursing home, EMS, home health workers top the list. “Hospital staff members working directly with coronavirus patients and workers in long-term care institutions serving vulnerable populations should be the first state residents to receive vaccines for COVID-19, a Texas health department panel has recommended.”
New Online: Recent Updates to Finding Aids and Digital Images Available Online (Texas State Library and Archives Commission)
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: New Online: Recent Updates to Finding Aids and Digital Images Available Online. “As our archives staff work on an ongoing basis to arrange, preserve, describe, and make available to the public the materials under our care, we spotlight new additions to the website in a regular feature from Out of the Stacks. The column lists new and revised finding aids recently made available online.”
KTSM: El Paso now has more active COVID-19 cases than entire Republic of Mexico
KTSM: El Paso now has more active COVID-19 cases than entire Republic of Mexico. “The coronavirus continues to pound El Paso hard, with the City-County Health Department reporting 13 deaths and 994 new infections on Tuesday. Add to that late tests results from the Texas Department of Health and the county has now recorded 76,075 cases and 782 fatalities since the pandemic began. Local hospitals on Tuesday were treating 1,120 COVID-19 patients, with 313 in intensive care and 202 on ventilators. A total of 10 mobile morgues were supposed to be in operation by midweek to shore up cadaver storage facilities that have been overwhelmed.”
Texas Tribune: Coronavirus cases in Texas are soaring again. But this time Gov. Greg Abbott says no lockdown is coming.
Texas Tribune: Coronavirus cases in Texas are soaring again. But this time Gov. Greg Abbott says no lockdown is coming.. “This week, more than 7,400 Texans are hospitalized for COVID-19, and the positivity rate has exceeded 10% for over three weeks. But the governor’s strategy as the state heads into the holidays is to stay the course, relying on a 2-month-old blueprint to claw back reopenings regionally based on hospitalizations. The mask order remains in place, but last week he ruled out ‘any more lockdowns,’ and tensions are again rising with local officials who want more authority to impose safety restrictions.”
New York Times: The County With No Coronavirus Cases? No Longer
New York Times: The County With No Coronavirus Cases? No Longer. “Zoom in on the glowing red map of ever-escalating coronavirus cases in the continental United States and for months you would find a county that had been spared. It remained that way until it was the only one, from coast to coast. Like a lone house standing after a tornado has leveled a town, Loving County, in the shadeless dun plains of oil-rich West Texas, had not recorded a single positive case of the coronavirus.”
Washington Post: Texas surpasses 20,000 virus deaths, second highest in US
Washington Post: Texas surpasses 20,000 virus deaths, second highest in US. “Texas surpassed 20,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths Monday, as COVID-19 continues to surge in the United States. That is the second-highest death count overall in the U.S., trailing only New York, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University. It’s the 22nd-highest per capita at 69.7 deaths per 100,000 people.”
Texas Tribune: Incarcerated Texans enlisted to work in county morgue as COVID-19 deaths overwhelm El Paso
Texas Tribune: Incarcerated Texans enlisted to work in county morgue as COVID-19 deaths overwhelm El Paso. “The morgue in El Paso is so overwhelmed by the number of people dying from COVID-19 that inmates from the county’s detention facility are being brought in to assist with the overflow of bodies awaiting autopsy. While the work these inmates do in the community typically goes unpaid, Chris Acosta, a spokesperson for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, said ‘trustees refused to work unless they were compensated.’ They’re making $2 per hour.”
Vox: 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime
Vox: 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime. “Over 230 people have died from Covid-19 in Texas’s correctional facilities — and in county jails, nearly 80 percent of them were in pretrial detention and hadn’t even been convicted of a crime, according to a new report. A team of researchers at the University of Austin at Texas reviewed data from the the Texas Justice Initiative which collects information from multiple sources including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). They found that at least 231 people have died of Covid-19 in the state’s correctional facilities between March and October.”
Houston Chronicle: Texas getting shipments of COVID-19 treatment drugs Regeneron and bamlanivimab
Houston Chronicle: Texas getting shipments of COVID-19 treatment drugs Regeneron and bamlanivimab. “Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that Texas will be distributing a federally approved COVID-19 treatment that helps protect people with mild illness from developing severe symptoms. But the supplies are likely to be limited.”
Dallas Morning News: Dallas County, Texas set single-day records for new coronavirus cases
Dallas Morning News: Dallas County, Texas set single-day records for new coronavirus cases. “Dallas County on Tuesday reported 1,401 more coronavirus cases — all of them considered new and the county’s highest single-day total of the pandemic. Two new COVID-19 deaths were also reported. The county reported more cases twice in August, but on both occasions the total included significant numbers of older, previously unreported cases from the Texas Department of State Health Services backlog.”
CNN: Texas becomes the first US state with more than 1 million Covid-19 infections
CNN: Texas becomes the first US state with more than 1 million Covid-19 infections. “Texas has now surpassed one million Covid-19 infections since the start of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — becoming the first US state to record such a staggering number of cases. That means about one tenth of the country’s more than 10 million positive tests were reported in the Lone Star state.”
KFOX14: El Paso moves to 10 mobile morgues for COVID-19 deaths as judge wants to extend shutdown
KFOX14: El Paso moves to 10 mobile morgues for COVID-19 deaths as judge wants to extend shutdown. “Last weekend, El Paso County set up its third and fourth mobile morgue units as COVID-19 patients were dying faster than the county could investigate them, leading to a backlog of 85 bodies. Since then, the county has already received 93 more deceased coronavirus patients, and it’s now having to make an even bigger jump in storage space.”
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: Search Texas Supreme Court Records Online
Texas State Library And Archives Commission: Search Texas Supreme Court Records Online. “In an earlier post, we wrote about the recovery and preservation of Supreme Court case files removed from state custody. Today, we highlight recent efforts by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) to improve public access to early Texas Supreme Court case files.”
CNN: Texas landowners facing coronavirus pandemic and land seizures for border wall
CNN: Texas landowners facing coronavirus pandemic and land seizures for border wall. “Within the last six months, as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the US, the Trump administration filed 75 lawsuits to seize private land along the US-Mexico border for the border wall, according to data reviewed by CNN from the Texas Civil Rights Project.”