EP. 88: Texas Pandemics

Wise About Texas

Ken Wise

Texan, Places & Travel, Education, Texas, Cowboy, History, Society & Culture, Culture, Jacinto, Texans, San

5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has been a trying time for Texans. But we've been through much worse. The harsh climate, tropical ports, lack of medicine, etc. has resulted in Texans enduring several pandemics and epidemics through the years. From yellow fever to cholera to smallpox, it seems as though we've seen it all. Texas is sometimes a tough place to live, but Texans have always been tougher. Hear some stories from prior pandemics in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Howdy and welcome the Wise About Texas, your Texas history podcast. This is your host Ken Wise. Thank you very much for tuning in today for a little bit of Texas history. I'm recording this episode in June of 2020. We are in a very interesting time here in Texas and around the
0:28.7	United States. In late 2019 scientists identified a new type of coronavirus originating in China,
0:38.0	and by early 2020 it was on its way to pandemic status around the world, including the United States.
0:46.0	And various state governments in the United States reacted in different ways.
0:51.0	Some states tried to totally restrict their citizens movements,
0:55.6	the citizens ability to work, ability to shop, all that kind of stuff, which generally did not go very well.
1:01.6	States with high density living conditions
1:06.0	got hit much worse for obvious reasons.
1:09.0	And here in Texas, the governor declared a state of emergency and issued some executive orders designed to try and slow the spread of the virus to the extent possible, which of course it's not real possible, it's a virus, the virus is going to spread, but we were trying to, here in Texas, limit a surge of hospitalizations that might overwhelm the number of hospital beds that we had.
1:37.0	And we did that, managed to do that.
1:40.0	And currently, while this podcast episode is being recorded and released,
1:45.0	we've opened the state back up now for almost a month.
1:49.0	We're starting to strive at least to get back to a little bit of normal as we learn to live with this
1:55.2	Corona virus luckily the death rates from this virus are extraordinarily
2:00.1	low but obviously you don't want to get sick. So all of you good
2:06.0	listeners of this podcast know that this episode was coming. We have to talk
2:11.0	about pandemics and epidemics in Texas history.
2:15.0	So let's go back as far back as the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca
2:20.0	and get wise about Texas.
2:23.0	Now the first thing I want to do is talk about the word epidemic versus pandemic. The current coronavirus situation
2:36.7	is being referred to as a pandemic which technically refers to how a disease spreads
2:42.3	geographically around the world and an epidemic is more of a
	...

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