City Council Hears Reports, Conducts Business

City Manager Cody Thompson reports to the City Council.

At its monthly meeting in City Hall yesterday evening, the Roscoe City Council heard reports from the City Manager and Chief of Police and conducted routine business in a relatively uneventful session.

City Manager Cody Thompson updated the Council on recent public works and current plans. He said that due to resident complaints, the new rate structure for City water and sewer are currently under review by Raftelis Consultants, the company advising the city on the rate changes.

Plans for the July 4th Celebration on Saturday, July 4, are underway with live street music to begin at 6:30pm followed by Lyndall Underwood and the Dusty Creek Band, who are opening for this year’s featured group, Jason Boland and the Stragglers. The Plowboy Mudbog will be held at the baseball field with attendance at this year’s competition free of charge. A fireworks show is planned by the Roscoe Volunteer Fire Department, and the Council approved a fireworks permit for this year as one of its action items.

City workers demolished two abandoned homes, one at 6th and Elm and the other at 5th and Ash. Workers have been busy recently with water leaks and with patching of city streets.

The annual summer sealcoat program with the County is planned to begin in mid-July.

Roscoe’s projects with TWDB (Texas Water Development Board and TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) are still on hold as their offices are still closed because of the coronavirus.

The City has also had to rebuild a pump for the West Booster R-O Water Facility due to the impellers wearing out because of sand.

The City plans to have the City Swimming Pool ready to open by mid-June but still has not selected a summer operator.  

Carl Childers is still actively cultivating development at Young Farm Estates for a hotel and travel center.

Police Chief Felix Pantoja also gave the Police Report for May, and although it happened on June 1, he also reported on the head-on collision which happened on US 84. There were two fatalities at the scene of the accident, and now the 6-year-old girl who was injured and taken to a Lubbock hospital has also passed away. The crash is under investigation by the Roscoe Police because it occurred inside the Roscoe City Limits with the Texas Highway Patrol assisting. They are awaiting toxicology results, but there was no evidence of alcohol at the scene.

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PLOWBOYS, PLOWGIRLS JOIN SCHOOL WORKOUTS

Head football coach Jake Freeman reports that almost 90 athletes turned out Monday to participate in strength and conditioning and sport specific instruction.

The workouts are in the mornings weekly from Monday through Thursday.

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ACTIVE COVID-19 CASES FALL IN AREA, RISE IN TEXAS

It’s been a generally good week in the Big Country for the coronavirus, but not necessarily in Texas as a whole, especially in the cities, where active cases and hospitalizations are increasing. Abilene has had zero hospitalizations for Covid-19 for several days now and the number of active cases has dropped all the way to eight. The Big Country still is relatively free of the disease, but there have been increases in both Snyder and Sweetwater.

After the Governor’s mandated testing of all Texas rest homes, Sweetwater Health Center reported six positive cases, two of them workers and the other four patients. However, the official count of total positives for Nolan County is now seven, so I’m not sure where that other new positive came from. Last week Snyder reported 30 positives in the community and 39 in a rest home, but those in the rest home turned out to be from a bad batch of tests as did the 19 Eastland County tests from rest homes in Eastland and Cisco. I have not read anywhere, however, that the tests at Sweetwater Health Center were faulty or questioned, unless I missed something, which is also possible. Snyder now has more active Covid-19 cases than Abilene with 24. That makes 26 for the year in Scurry County but the first two confirmed in April have both recovered and are no longer active.

In Texas the number of new cases per week is rising with 1,081 for the week of May 24 and 1,527 last week. The number of hospitalizations and fatalities is also rising since Memorial Day, but hospitals are still not pressed for space.  

Here are the numbers for this week as of yesterday:

Abilene has 248 positive results for the year with only 8 active cases and no hospitalizations.

Here are the area’s county figures as of yesterday (with last week’s in parentheses if different): Jones, 637 (606); Brown, 59; Scurry, 26 (32); Comanche, 12; Callahan, 10 (9); Howard, 9; Nolan 9 (2); Eastland, 7 (24); Stephens, 4; Coleman, 3; Haskell, 3; Runnels, 3 (2); Fisher, 2; Coke, 1;  Knox, 1; Mitchell, 1; Shackelford, 1.

Selected west Texas counties yesterday (with last Tuesday’s count in parentheses): Lubbock, 741 (704); Ector (Odessa), 187 (161); Midland, 155 (132); Wichita (Wichita Falls), 87 (85); Tom Green (San Angelo), 78 (70).

Texas now has 74,978 cases (66,568 last Tuesday) and 1,830 deaths (1,698 last Tuesday).

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WEATHER REPORT: ANOTHER WEEK WITHOUT RAIN

Strawberry Moon on Friday. (Photo by Pete Porter)

The Roscoe area and the Big Country have gone through another week without a significant rain, and the drouth is beginning to be serious. Yesterday, a wildfire broke out near Albany that destroyed at least two homes, and if some rain doesn’t relieve the area soon, it will be just the first of more such fires, which are bound to follow.

Besides being dry, it’s also been hot with sunny skies and daily highs from Thursday through Monday between 96° and 102°. The weather cooled off a bit yesterday as a windy norther blew in Monday night. The high yesterday was only 89°, but the wind kicked up a lot of dust, and the skies yesterday morning were a dusty red, not the color you want to see at cotton planting time in June.

The projected high for today is only 91° with a light northeast breeze, but tomorrow the wind will be back from the south and the heat will return. If the forecast is correct, starting tomorrow, each successive day for the next week or so will be like the one before it with south winds of 10-15mph, sunny skies, highs between 95° and 100°, lows in the mid to upper sixties, and 0% chance of rain.

That’s not the forecast we wanted to see, but that’s what it is.

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COVID-19 AND THE LONDON PLAGUE OF 1666

Editor’s note: I usually present some aspect of Roscoe history when news is short, but this week I thought I’d do something different, which although not Roscoe related, does have some bearing on the lives we are all living these days, i.e., a comparison of our current situation with a related one from the past.

Like many others in the past months, I’ve spent less time out with friends and more time at home alone. As a result, I’ve been doing more reading than usual, and since we’re dealing with an event never dealt with in any of our lives, i.e., the coronavirus pandemic, I thought it might be time to re-read A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the year 1665, when another epidemic, the bubonic plague, struck London and wiped out thousands and infected even more. The book, first published in 1722, was written by Daniel Defoe, also the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

Unlike those fictional novels, though, this work is a documentary account of life in London in that fateful year, how the epidemic began, how Londoners reacted, what they did as it raged through the city, how it ended, and how they dealt with its devastation. I read it years ago but thought it might be interesting to re-read, now that I had something to compare it to, namely, our current situation. I’m glad I did, because what I found is that even though the differences are obvious, there are also some interesting similarities between the two.

The plague has stricken mankind several times, e.g., in ancient Greece, in second-century Rome, in medieval Europe, and again in England in 1665. Each time it did, it had disastrous effects, wiping out a third or more of the population. A bacterial disease, it is no longer a major threat because it can be cured by antibiotics developed in the twentieth century, but before that, there was no cure and people just had to deal with it as best they could.

This is the problem we have right now with Covid-19. We know it’s viral, not bacterial, but we don’t have a cure for it and also just deal with it as best we can. The strongest deterrents we have for invasive viruses, like the flu, are vaccines, but until we develop one that defends specifically against Covid-19, we have to just hope the body can successfully fight the virus off when it hits. We also hope that, like the plague, anyone who recovers from it doesn’t get it again, but we’re not yet entirely certain about that. It seems to be mostly true, but not absolutely, as there have been a handful of cases of people who apparently had relapses.

Like Covid-19, the 1665 plague began slowly. People knew about it, but as it was only a couple of cases in the west end of London, most paid it no mind and went on about their daily business. The early cases were in the winter, and the plague didn’t really pick up steam until the spring. Londoners knew what it was, and when it became apparent that more people were catching it and it was spreading across the city, those with the money and ability to leave town began a mass exodus. Commerce came to a halt as businesses of all kinds shut down, causing mass unemployment and cutting off workers from their livelihoods.

To help those without incomes and to stave off riots, the City of London spent massive amounts of money on food as we have seen governments spend for unemployment relief in the present pandemic. Ways were also found to hire the unemployed. When someone in a home caught the plague, the whole household was quarantined, and watchmen were hired to see that no one broke the quarantine, one for each affected home. Watchmen also ran errands for the quarantined, such as procuring food, medicine, and other necessaries. Women needing income were hired as nurses and caretakers for the stricken. And as the plague progressed, men were hired to pick up the dead bodies, cart them off, and bury them in mass graves. The work was dangerous, but they otherwise had no income, so they took the chances. Also, since the poor were always at more risk than others, their deaths were also much higher, which also alleviated unemployment.

Another similarity was the way the disease spread. The plague was often spread by those known to be infected, especially within the household, but the real public danger was the people who had no symptoms and thought they were healthy until it was too late. Speaking of the latter, Defoe says,

They had it [the contagion} upon them, and in their blood, yet did not show the consequences of it in their countenances: nay, even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several days. These breathed death in every place, and upon everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty.

He concludes by saying, “And this is the reason why it is impossible in a visitation to prevent the spreading of the plague by the utmost human vigilance: viz., that it is impossible to know the infected people from the sound, or that the infected people should perfectly know themselves.” And, as we have learned, the same is true of the spreading of Covid-19.

Unlike today, during the plague there were no restrictions on the healthy, who were free to go about as they always had (unless there was sickness in the home). However, many who stayed in London shut themselves up in their homes and never went out, instead sending servants or others to obtain food and other necessities. Some stayed inside for months. One who did described how he did:

I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese; but I had no flesh-meat, and the plague raged so violently among the butchers and slaughter-houses…that it was not advisable so much as to go over the street among them.

And how did the plague end? It raged the entire spring and summer and thousands died every week as it spread through the city, but finally in the fall it began to diminish, not in the number of infections, but in the number of deaths. As the author of the work puts it, the disease lost its “malignity,” i.e., its strength or virulence. As the weeks passed, the plague continued to spread with an abundance of new cases, but the number of recoveries increased, and the number of fatalities fell with each passing week. This trend continued into the fall, a development that the author could only attribute to God’s grace, as the physicians still had no cure for the disease.

It will be nice if the same happens with Covid-19 with its number of deaths and hospitalizations decreasing as time goes on. Some scientists believe that the longer we live with the virus, the milder its effects will become. As an article in the New York Times points out, “in the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts.”

This is what happened to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Over time its strength lessened, and there were fewer deaths as it mutated. It never died out but eventually became what is now referred to as H1N1 flu. But even if this happens, we don’t know how long it will take before it does.

Some fear that Covid-19 may follow the course of the Spanish flu, that is, with a lessening in the summer months and a return to increased strength in the fall. As time goes on, however, the “malignity” of the virus may indeed fade, just as it did with the plague 350 years ago and the Spanish Flu 100 years ago.

If so, listing the number of new positives may not be as useful as noting the rate of hospitalizations and deaths. If the latter two are decreasing, then the former is not as significant. Of course, it’s just a theory, but since this is how things turned out before, it’s at least a possibility.

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