Nearly one out of every 100 people living in Lamb County, Texas, died of COVID-19, one of the highest death rates in the nation. But in June 2022, more than two years after the start of the pandemic, many residents in the rural towns making up the panhandle county say things are back to normal. At a fundraiser for a Catholic church in Olton in the northeast part of the county, local families had set up stands selling gorditas and aguas frescas, and a live band belted out Tejano crowd pleasers while couples danced. Javi Lopez, 17 at the time, told me that people were comfortable gathering in groups now. Some of his friends had lost parents and other family members to the virus. “Now they’re better,” he said. “They cope with it.” He was standing a few feet away from where Linda Casares had been watching the performance. Two of her brothers died in the summer of 2020. She still cries when she talks about them.
I first came to report on the pandemic in Lamb County in the winter of 2020–2021. Now, with deaths slowing and the pandemic slipping out of the public consciousness a year and a half later, I was back to write about what moving on looks like here—if such a thing is even possible. It’s a topic that defies easy explanations. For some people, the lucky ones, it’s like nothing ever happened. For many others, nothing will ever be the same. Some of those who died were pillars of the local community, and their loss has further crippled towns that already seemed to be fading into the endless, empty landscape. Many people continue to believe conspiracy theories that circulated during the pandemic, that the virus was all a hoax, or that it was never as bad as health authorities made it out to be. Others are still angry about what they’ve gone through—about the mothers, husbands, children they will never see again. But amid tides of contradictory news and misinformation, many have little idea of who to blame.
There are many places like Lamb County around the country—poor, rural towns, susceptible to misinformation, which were suffering even before the pandemic, and have now taken another body blow. What happened here is typical of a broader, little-noticed disaster across flyover America. These also weren’t the only regions that suffered—the pain, the losses, the lingering division left by the pandemic can be found almost anywhere in the country. In Lamb, the permanent effects are just more visible, a reminder of the magnitude of what we’ve lost, and how little we’ve reckoned with it.
Source : Time