TREVINO AND CAMERON COUNTY FINALLY MAKE IT ON CNN

"They're gonna put me in the movies

They're gonna make a big star out of me...

The biggest fool that's ever hit the big time

And all I gotta do is act naturally.." Buck Owens

By Juan Montoya

Well, Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, just as he predicted to some of his staff, has hit the big time.

Today CNN has come to the southernmost tip of the United States to interview the elected official who has been sitting atop an exploding COVID-19 powder keg as the hyper contagious disease ravages his constituents.

Just yesterday, it was Hidalgo County's Richard Cortez in the spotlight, and doubtless, the county judges of Starr and Willacy County will also do a cameo for the national broadcaster wringing their hand in anguish and begging Texas Governor Greg Abbott to let them impose enforceable emergency restrictions to force the citizens to modify their behavior.

Abbott, a Trump clone, has said no to a lock down or a closing – even a partial one –  of the economy and immediately removed the teeth of Cortez's Stay-in-Place order announcing he will not authorize fines or arrests to enforce the measures to fight the spread of the virus in the state, let alone the Rio Grande Valley.

And Treviño, who trots out his Chief Medical Officer Dr. James Castillo as a prop for his almost-daily press conferences on his bully cyber pulpit, had to admit yesterday in the face of overwhelming evidence, that he has been misleading the public on the number of COVID-19 deaths.


For months he has been doling out daily death reports that seem to indicate that only a few people are dying despite the facts on the ground as hospital ICU units are over capacity, mobile morgues in hospital parking lots are filling up with corpses, and funeral homes are turning away customers.

This is not counting the residents who died without care and were found in their homes where they laid down and died alone when they could get no help from the medical establishment.

In the face of this continuing horror, Treviño and his sidekick Castillo – the medical Charlie McCarthy of Cameron County – told residents last week that there had been no documented deaths on Wednesday and only 10 a day later. The operable word here was "documented."

When confronted on Monday with anecdotal evidence that scores of people have been dying daily, they clarified their statements.

They both said that the deaths they had been reporting were actually deaths that the health department had been able to "certify" and that they dated back to June or early July. They admitted that after three months of being assailed by the virus, they still had no system in place to count the bodies as they dropped.


"We’re only reporting 96, and we’re going to be catching up on those very soon,” Castillo said Monday. “Those numbers are going to be going up this week a lot…. The numbers you’re going to be seeing this week are weeks old. These are people who died at the end of June and throughout the month of July. There’s lots of people sick in the hospital right now, and I pray for them.”

The local daily reported that Castillo had blamed the shortage of personnel at the health department for the artificially low numbers.

He said keeping an accurate, day-to-day tally has been hampered by the fact that doctors have been preoccupied with trying to save lives, leaving little time for paperwork, while health department staff – who still rely heavily on paper documents and faxes – have been overwhelmed.

As of July 22, the official death count from COVID-19 stands at 126, but as Castillo said, that doesn’t represent the actual number. At the department’s request, the state sent in 20 temporary workers to help work through the documentation backlog, Castillo said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the actual number of infections nationwide is probably 10 times higher than the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. That means Cameron County, which was at 6,520 total positive cases is more likely closer to 65,200 positive cases, Castillo said.

Using their own numbers, this means that at an accepted 5 percent mortality rate, Cameron County could be sitting on a real death number of 3,260, and that's not counting what's to come.

If Treviño and Castillo had been as forthcoming in the previous three months, perhaps county residents would not have treated the contagion so cavalierly, continued to gather in crowds for family celebrations, and flock to the open beaches of the City of South Padre Island whose officials seem to think that with the county's beach parks closed on the island, they have the golden opportunity to cash in on the monopoly and urge residents to come for sun and fun.

   "Life is short...," posted Clayton Brashear, owner of Clayton's beach bar, billed as the Biggest Beach Bar in Texas "If your 80-year-old parents want to spend their last days looking at the ocean, take them, it's better than looking at the 4 walls in a nursing home."

A few hours later, even this was too much for the brash and jaunty Brashear, and he took the post down and sanitized it to a simple "Life is short enjoy every day."

Reports from local media (SOMOS' Channel 5, KRGV) showed that the help at the island's hotels have been testing positive for the virus and scores have stayed at home rather than risk the chance of infection to the point where at least one has closed until 2021.

And party boats filled with 70 to 90 partygoers ply the waters of the Laguna without face masks and disregard for social distancing while Treviño – who counts on the campaign contributions of Brashear and his fellow SPI hoteliers and owners of tourist-oriented commerce – can only act indignant and say he is "looking into it."


Other island visitors disregarded his closing of county beaches by simply parking on the road, jumping across the sand dunes between county access points, and partying on the unguarded stretches of sand and surf. Face masks? Social distancing? Are you kidding?

Today, Treviño got his dream. He got interviewed by CNN as the crisis deepens and he – as the county's executive officer – blamed the the residents for the worsening crisis and his constituents dying in droves. During Monday's press conference it was Abbott and Trump who were the boggeymen.

(And incidentally, where is Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. whose PAC sponsors paid for the mass mailings of campaign postcards saying he has been, and will continue fighting COVID-19 because "we're all in this together"? With the election over, we doubt you'll see him or Eddie III at the  barricades for a photo op handing out free lunches anymore. By the way, he was handing out lunches at the new restaurant opened by his son's administrative assistant Ruben O'Bell which he appropriately corny named Maiz.)

Predictably, there were some who saw the CNN coverage of Treviño's disaster-in-the-making as if he had done good, put on a good act, and praised him for giving a "good interview."

And all he has to do is act naturally.