Coronavirus well and truly landed in Dallas Thursday night. Five additional Dallas County residents tested positive for the virus, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said. Importantly, one of those five who tested positive has no known travel history. Dallas has crossed a key threshold — the virus has been passed…
As reports of a new influenza epidemic sweeping the coast alarmed residents, Dallas’ chief doctor offered reassurances. “The general health situation in Dallas is good,” he told a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. The disease wasn’t much worse than the common flu, he claimed. It was 1918, and the…
For a few moments Sunday evening and as this week got started, we actually felt a little bad for Ted Cruz. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple of weeks ago, Cruz shook hands with a man later diagnosed as having been infected with the coronavirus. Cruz did the…
A Tarrant County resident tested presumptive positive for COVID-19, health officials there announced Tuesday evening. The person is the sixth reported case of the novel coronavirus in North Texas and the 21st in the state, according to Texas Health and Human Services.
Dallas County reported its first case of the novel coronavirus after an out-of-state traveler tested “presumptive positive” for the disease, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins announced Tuesday afternoon. Jenkins described the person as “a 77-year-old out-of-state traveler with extensive travel history” and said the person is being treated at a Dallas-area…
The wife and child of a Frisco man who tested “presumed positive” Monday for the novel coronavirus have also tested positive for the disease, Collin County officials said Tuesday. County officials said the man traveled to Silicon Valley for business in late February. Santa Clara County, California, has been the…
During the United States’ last big infectious disease crisis, Dallas went first. On Sept. 30, 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national who’d recently traveled to Dallas, tested positive for Ebola, setting off weeks of fear and uncertainty. Two nurses who treated Duncan, Nina Pham and Amber Vinson, also contracted…
Collin County health officials have identified a Frisco man as a “presumptive positive” case of the novel coronavirus. The man, who is in his late 30s, had recently traveled to California, where 114 cases of the virus have been confirmed, said Collin County Judge Chris Hill. The man is in…
The threat level for the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is still low for most Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that doesn’t mean officials and the public shouldn’t take precautions, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred said during a town hall meeting Friday. Allred, as…
Sen. Ted Cruz announced Sunday evening that he’ll be spending the better part of a week at home after meeting a person later later confirmed to have COVID-19 — the disease stemming from the novel coronavirus — at the Conservative Political Action Conference week before last. Cruz is not sick…
Tuesday when I wrote this thing, the list of entities and people pulling out of SXSW because of coronavirus, according to the Austin American-Statesman, included Facebook, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Intel, Mashable, the Global Alternative Food Awards and a trade show for Chinese companies called China Gathering. As for China…
Texas’ chief lawyer, Ken Paxton, joined attorneys general from across the country last week in urging the Food and Drug Administration to tighten electronic cigarette regulations. In a letter, co-signed by Paxton, the attorneys sharply criticize the agency’s recent efforts to combat the youth vaping epidemic. “The current guidance will not…
For months, Parkland Hospital administrators have been touting a new focus on tackling health disparities in Dallas’ poorest ZIP codes. Now, they’ve released details about how they’ll do it. The hospital is hiring community health workers and plans to deploy them in southern Dallas to help fight heightened mortality rates,…
In 2018, Dallas set an ambitious goal to speed up medical emergency response times: get to the scene within five minutes at least 90% of the time. The new goal — based on guidelines set by the National Fire Protection Association — was a reaction to growing dissatisfaction with how long it took ambulances to…
The Dallas County public defender’s office plans to hire social workers to help keep its mentally ill clients out of jail. It’s one more attempt to end the cycle of hospitalization, incarceration and homelessness caused by the criminalization — rather than treatment — of mental illness. Nonprofits and county administrators…
The Observer’s news vertical is, for the most part, a local concern. We do our best to stay focused on DFW, while occasionally allowing our eyes to wander further afield to the rest of Texas. So we are, for the purposes of this article at least, going to disregard about 99.8%…
Customers of Dallas vape shops looking for Mango Juul cartridges are finding empty shelves and heavy markups. Instead, they’re turning to Puff Bars, a nearly identical product that skirts the new rules by fusing the liquid-filled cartridge to the pen-sized stem. Users consume the liquid — which can last from…
Dallas County confirmed on Thursday that the teenager who died late last year as a result of vaping was 15. That makes the teenager the epidemic’s youngest victim, underscoring North Texas’ outsize role in the nationwide outbreak of vaping-related illnesses. The state has reported the most hospitalizations in the nation,…
A Dallas teenager’s death from a lung injury associated with vaping comes at a time when hospitalizations for the mysterious disease are on the decline nationwide. The teenager is the first person in Dallas County to die of injuries related to e-cigarette use, according to Dallas County Health and Human…
Everyone, it seems, has something good to say about plans for the city’s new jail diversion center. District Attorney John Creuzot called it a “solution” to the city’s continued criminalization of homelessness and mental illness. “Ditto,” said Lynn Richardson, chief of the Dallas County Public Defender’s Office, which represents many…
Nearly a fifth of the nation’s youngest uninsured children live in Texas, a stark reminder that the state has some of the most restrictive policies in the nation governing healthcare benefits for its most vulnerable residents. More than 8% of Texan children under the age of 6 are not insured, according…
Dallas’ jails and emergency rooms are overwhelmed by mental health crises. These institutions of last resort have become the only option for many “high utilizers,” people who return time after time in need of medication or counseling. It’s not their fault, explains Jessica Martinez, the chief clinical officer at a…
