GABBY AND EDDIE GARCIA MAKE FRONT PAGE OF THE TIMES

Gabby Garcia and her brother Eddie Garcia lost a sister to the coronavirus last year. The siblings, who also fell ill to the virus, are now vaccinated. “We did it for her,” Ms. Garciasaid. Credit...Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times

By Edgar Sandoval

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Gabby Garcia did not expect to feel like crying when she sat down for her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. But as the long needle pierced her skin, she thought back to the agonizing outbreak in her family that killed her sister, hospitalized her brother and also left her ill for days.

“It was a sense of relief, ‘I’m getting it’,” Ms. Garcia said of the vaccine. “It was the sense of what if? What if this had been available sooner? My sister’s death and us getting sick definitely motivated me to get the vaccine.”

(Gabby and Eddie Garcia held a photo collage of their sister, Margarita Gonzalez, who died last year. Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times.)

While officials across the country have offered free beer, concert tickets and millions of dollars in lottery winnings to encourage vaccinations, residents of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas have needed little prodding. Exposure to death and disease has been enough incentive. 

The four-county region accounts for nearly 10 percent of the state’s some 52,000 deaths from the coronavirus. But today, deaths are significantly down, as are case numbers, and vaccination rates are higher than both the broader state and national averages. In one county, about 70 percent of residents 12 and older are fully vaccinated, according to state figures and a vaccine tracker by the New York Times.

“I think pretty much everyone in the region knew someone who died from Covid,” said Dr. Michael R. Dobbs, vice dean of clinical affairs for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which operates the region’s only medical school. “So people wanted the vaccine.”

People waiting to receive a coronavirus vaccine at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Texas, this month.Credit...Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times

At its height last summer, the coronavirus tore through the region. Hospitals were overloaded with patients, many of whom waited hours to be seen. Funeral homes were so busy that many needed large refrigerators to store bodies for several weeks. On its worst day, Hidalgo County, the most populous county in the Valley, reported the deaths of more than 60 people, reaching a coronavirus death rate of 5 percent, more than double the 2 percent national average.

So when vaccines became available, people scrambled to line up. They flocked to area schools, fire stations and even flea markets, or pulgas, where local residents gather in large numbers. They slept in parking lots, jammed phone lines and showed up without appointments pleading for a leftover dose, health officials said.

“Older people really feared death,” said Dr. Emilie Prot, a regional medical director with the state department of health. “A lot of times we needed to turn people away.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/us/coronavirus-vaccines-texas-border.html