It came during Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez's Zoom message to the Brownsville Independent School District board.
Mendez was addressing the board and expressed his support of their resolution to start the school year August 25 with distance learning instead of face-to-face instruction in response to the spike in COVID-19 cases across South Texas.
On Wednesday, Texas again set a new high with nearly 10,800 new cases, along with a record 110 deaths.
The rising toll includes 35 deaths that officials on the border said happened Wednesday morning alone in Hidalgo County. That was more than twice the number of new deaths reported in Harris County — which has five times the population...
“For those people who think this virus is a joke, that it’s made up, not real, that it’s not having an impact, I want you to take a look at that chart,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said, waving to a graphic listing biographical details about the new deaths.
And in Brownsville, where Mendez said that the city had performed 9,000 tests on local residents, and where "well over 1,000" had recovered so far, but might have long-lasting effects, he said that although the Cameron County Health Dept. has recorded 35 deaths for the city, the reality may be different.
"The number is actually higher...a hospital alone has reported 51...," he said.
That revealing statement has been echoed across the city, with residents casting doubts on the numbers trotted out by Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño during his frequent press conferences. For a long time, the policy of concealment of the real mortality rate has been adopted by the county's health officials and despite the pages in the newspaper announcing local deaths, the numbers of the county health department remain unrealistically low.
Despite the 51 deaths alone in one Brownsville hospital, the county reported that the total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Cameron County is 79 with no additional deaths reported overnight.
Is it believable to say – given the 51 reported in one Brownsville hospital – that there have only been 28 deaths elsewhere in the entire county?
When asked about the apparent incongruence in the number reported and the actual number of deaths – a county health department staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity – said that the department was at least "a month behind" in the reporting.
"It takes a lot of time to interview all the contacts to determine if the cause of death was the COVID-19 virus," he said. "We're far behind."
For a long time, Cameron County Clerk Sylvia Garza-Perez and other county administrators denied that increasing numbers of county employees had tested positive for the virus, but in the end, she herself fell victim to the disease and had to be placed on a ventilator before being sent home to recover t make room for more patients. Now we have an unconfirmed report that a person on the clerk's staff may have perished.
Mendez said that since May 26, the positivity rate had increased in Texas from 4.27 percent to today's 16.89 percent.
"We find ourselves in a very critical situation...in a scenario that the world has not seen in the last 100 years," he told BISD board members.
For Mendez to admit that local residents have not been getting the true picture from their elected officials is a hopeful first step toward fully understanding what they face and confronting a reality instead of a fairy tale based on wishful thinking.