The ‘Dr. Fauci’ of the Texas Border Is Counting the Dead - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/us/coronavirus-laredo-texas.html
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/29/us/00VIRUS-LAREDO-1/00VIRUS-LAREDO-1-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg Challenges also exist across the border in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, where Dr. Cigarroa also occasionally makes house calls. He said cartel members there had begun controlling the trade in oxygen tanks. Some Nuevo Laredo families, Dr. Cigarroa said, plead with doctors to list pneumonia instead of Covid-19 as the cause of death so they can skirt regulations that prohibit family members from being present at Covid-19 burials, a phenomenon he said is contributing to an undercount of the pandemic’s toll along the border. Sergio Mora, the host of the Laredo political podcast “Frontera Radio,” said the crisis hit home recently when in the space of a few days he lost two people close to him — a longtime employee at his family’s towing company across the border, in Nuevo Laredo, and his grandmother.
“Dr. Cigarroa is a respected voice who is out there ringing the alarm bells,” Mr. Mora said. “People just need to listen.”Agitating against the virus’s spread comes somewhat naturally to Dr. Cigarroa, a fourth-generation Mexican-American whose family forged one of Texas’ most remarkable medical dynasties.Both Dr. Cigarroa’s father and uncle were influential doctors who led the effort to bring Texas A&M International University to Laredo. Born into a family of 10 children, one of Dr. Cigarroa’s siblings is a nurse and three are doctors, including his brother, Francisco, a transplant surgeon and former chancellor of the University of Texas System. Dr. Cigarroa’s son, also a doctor, now practices in the same cardiology clinic he does. When Laredo’s hospitals began struggling with the influx of coronavirus patients, Dr. Cigarroa, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, took the unconventional step of converting his practice into a makeshift Covid-19 clinic.Each evening after Dr. Cigarroa signs death certificates, patients stream into the clinic where they are evaluated, treated and sometimes promptly hospitalized in an adjacent part of the medical complex.Many are uninsured, but Dr. Cigarroa treats them anyway. He said his aim was not to make a profit but to stay afloat financially while paying the salaries of his employees.The daily grind takes its own toll. In July, Dr. Cigarroa himself came down with Covid-19. At first he thought it would be a case of relatively mild “corona light” and opted to rest at home for a few days.But then he awoke short of breath, in a panic. Wary of using any of Laredo’s last remaining doses of remdesivir, the antiviral drug used for treatment of Covid-19, he opted to be taken to University Hospital in San Antonio, where his brother is a doctor.“I went down like a dog baying at the moon,” Dr. Cigarroa said. “I was a bit callous before that. I came back a much better physician".
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