(DALLAS, Texas) At 133,811 confirmed cases and 1,497 deaths, Dallas County has become a COVID-19 hotspot, with Harris County being the only other Texan county to have more cases and deaths. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare officials are scrambling to meet the needs of the public and combat an ever-increasing spread of Coronavirus. VNN’s O’Neil Hesson sat down with family physician Dr. Rajan Kohli, MD, in Dallas and discussed the city's current pandemic situation, how effective masks are, and what the public needs to do to help mitigate the rise of COVID cases.

O’Neil: “There’s been numerous misconceptions about the effectiveness of masks. When, where, and why should the public continue to wear protective gear.”

Dr. Kohli: “Let’s start with when you should not wear a mask. If you are in an empty room by yourself, if you’re driving a car and there’s nobody else around you, or if you’re walking outside and there’s nobody around you; there’s not really any need to wear a mask in those circumstances. Now if you’re in a room with other people then masks [are] the best strategy in addition to social distancing… There’s a lot of misconception amongst the public and [often] it’s politicized which is quite unfortunate.”

O’Neil: “It’s funny you say that because there’s talk from anti-maskers that breathing in your own C02 can affect your lung health. Is that true?”

Dr. Kohli: “No it really doesn’t, historically for the last 100 years plus, surgeons that are in operating rooms have been wearing masks all day every day for most of their adult lives. There’s no data that shows that [masks] have adversely affected their longevity in any form. The only time [it would negatively affect your health] is if you have an allergy to the mask or if you have severe asthma or lung conditions like advanced COPD in which you’re struggling to breathe. In those cases, you shouldn’t be out anyways.”

O’Neil: “If we can trust the effectiveness of masks, what are your thoughts on a statewide mask mandate. Do you think the policy should be pursued?”

Dr. Kohli: “I think that’s a very difficult answer because what ends of happening is… you have to balance out the commerce, the politics, the science, and all these different things. Clearly it can be perceived as tyrannical if the government is imposing that view on you. The community is best served if the patients or general public takes it amongst themselves to [wear] their masks and really the purpose of wearing a mask is not to protect yourself, but to protect other people from yourself. That’s really the mindset… 

The mode of transmission from the majority of these cases are being spread by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carrier. Meaning… in the first three or four days, you’re a carrier and you’re not showing any symptoms, but you are shedding the virus. So, in those beginning days when you’re negative PCR or positive PCR, in between that time, you can give it to your loved ones and something bad can happen to them. So really the act of wearing a mask is a selfless act not for you, but for the other person.” 

O’Neil: “With the talk of mask mandates and lockdowns, has the state and local officials made your job easier or harder when servicing the public?”

Dr. Kohli: “I think Dallas County has actually, overall, done a pretty good job in managing the crisis. Our infectious disease doctor at the hospital is on the Dallas County COVID phone calls on the regular basis. Even amongst the local politicians…they’ve done a good job with navigating this business while upholding public health. Creating effective policy can oftentimes be murky, especially since people are losing their jobs and can’t feed their families. My sense is that, if everybody is wearing a mask and adhering to social distancing, it becomes hard for the virus to spread. It spreads when you let your guard down or purposefully ignore guidelines as an act of defiance; which is a very selfish way to live.” 

O’Neil: “So essentially what you’re saying is that as long as we acknowledge the threat of COVID-19 we can still maintain our individual freedoms.”

Dr. Kohli: “Yes, I’m all about it. I was speaking with someone today, which was an ongoing dialogue for months and months, that they are arguing that statewide shutdown mandates are bad, tyrannical, and all these things, but I think the way our politicians or public health officials have to make these decisions is based on the number of ventilators that are available. That’s really what it boils down to. The number of ICU beds and ventilators that are available in the community dictate when it is the time to shut down. Every five hospitalizations [will amount to] at least one or two ending up in the ICU. It’s a pretty significant number. 

So for instance, say Dallas county only has 1,000 ICU beds, and say that its projected that there’s 900 [ICU] beds that are full; There has been 1,497 deaths in the county so if we’re projecting that in Dallas county it’s [the death count] going to increase to X times 1.4 or 1.5, then we can model it and see that in two weeks we’re going to need 1200 beds. If we run out of beds, the only way we can curb the spread is if everyone does nothing. If people would stay away from each other and limit social interaction, that then would dramatically reduce the spread of the virus. So those are the draconian measures that unfortunately our public health officials have to make to stop the flow of the virus.” 

O’Neil: “So basically, the main reason we would experience a second lockdown is because we started running out of ventilators and ICU beds.”

Dr. Kohli: “That’s it, not even the hospital beds. There are plenty of hospital beds, but there’s always more COVID patients that need ventilators than those who would be admitted with regular pneumonia. So, since there’s such a disproportionate nature of COVID respiratory failures, you need a much larger volume of ICU beds. That really dictates the closedowns. So, when these guys are considering closedowns, they’re basically looking at the ICU beds.”

O’Neil: “That’s very interesting I didn’t know that. I want to talk to you, however, about how this pandemic affected existing health of Americans in particularly. We know that comorbidities can range from having asthma to being overweight. How does an individual’s existing health conditions exacerbate the effects of COVID-19?”

Dr. Kohli: “That’s a good question. From what I see is that it’s [COVID-19] unraveling the health, or the lack thereof, in America. The number of people who have died from COVID is disproportionately high for a first world country. We have more deaths per capita, more hospitalized per capita, and it’s because of the chronic condition of Americans. That means in America, there is more chronic conditions than any other developed nation and a root cause is diabetes and obesity. Obesity is driving the lack of health in America. Majority of these patients fall into a couple of categories. They have obesity and hypertension. That’s the majority of patients. 

Second category, they have undiagnosed hypertension; they don’t have the resources to seek healthcare. We’re seeing a lot of this in East Dallas especially amongst the Hispanic population. It’s very common that we witness the trend of a significant amount of patients who either have poorly controlled diabetes, undiagnosed diabetes, or undiagnosed hypertension… Just poor lifestyle [choices], lack of accessibility to healthcare, poor diet, or lack of education to know what’s good for them and what’s not. The third category is the unfortunate young healthy person that will end up in the hospital with nothing wrong. How COVID works is—first it’s the virus that affects you. So, the initial four or five days, it’s the virus that’s causing the problem, then what’s more dangerous is the body’s immune response to the virus. The body’s immune response is triggered…and that’s what causes the lung damage and the different systems in the body to shut down.”

O’Neil: “Moving away briefly from just discussing this pandemic, there seems to be a disconnect with the public and medical professional recommendations. What more can be done to increase public education on this matter?”

Dr. Kohli: “So I think social media drives this a lot. If you take the fake news or the misinformation out of social media, you know the people propagating the anti-masks or anti vaccines and push the federal government to police social media so people don’t give non facts on these platforms. A lot of people are misinformed and either don’t know or want to know. It has to happen at all levels and it needs to start at the top. So, it starts at the president, his cabinet, at the school level, the parents, church [leaders], hospitals, and doctors. It’s really all hands-on deck. Everybody has to be engaged and educated. I think really the lesson here is that we need to get healthy. We are a very unhealthy country. We live in a quick fix band aid medicine type of situation. 

The way out of this crisis is to get to a better place in terms of health. I always tell my patients don’t go to aisle one through nine in the grocery store because it’s all junk. There’s only a couple aisles of real food. Lots of vegetables, low meat, low carbs, healthy fats, and lots of exercise. If you get COVID while having a strong immune system; typically, bad things don’t happen. There’s some challenges in this country because diversity. There are so many ethnicities, so many races, cultural issues, and political issues… the messaging gets lost because of all these things. What the medical professionals are telling you, if you listen to the medical professionals… they come from a place of knowledge and they come from a place of science.  Don’t listen to the person on the side of the road who doesn’t have experience in medicine, because there’s a good chance their knowledge is coming from social media.”

O’Neil: “I appreciate your time, but I only got one last question for you. Dallas counties COVID cases have been increasing. It’s the second worse in Texas. Dallas is a big city, what could be causing this, and do you think the end of the pandemic is near?”

Dr. Kohli: “A lot of these transmissions are happening in schools from the kids that are asymptomatic, and I think the schools are still opened, but they can carry COVID and spread it to their families. That’s one issue, then the restaurants and bars where transmissions are still happening. Then just people congregating for parties especially over the holidays. If I want to do a thanksgiving with my parents, I’d have five of us sit in a large room away from each other and just make it a short-abbreviated experience. Or go home and do it virtually; I know it’s a difficult thing for a lot of us and we want to congregate and socialize. 

I do think the end is near. I’m a very optimistic guy. I think by next July we should be in good shape for the vaccine, but I think we’ll have one more year [of COVID] before there’s enough immunity in the country where it will be less of a hazard. I think we’re kind of stuck with the masks and social distancing for at least another year. We’ll probably see another year of the same…slightly less hopefully, but we should expect this to not go away until at least 2022. Right now, the data is about 5-10% of the country’s population have been exposed or has antibodies. By next summer, between the normal infections and the immunizations, majority of us should have antibodies. That ought to help us quite a bit.”

United States of America

Texas

Dallas doctor gets real about COVID-19 cases

Brian Hesson

(ALLEN, Texas) Squeegees owner Ella Bassett told VNN she and her husband started a screen-printing business 20 years ago so they could be there for their two daughters more. 

“And that worked out for us,” Bassett said. “I wanted to know who my kids were, their friends were, and my coach, their teams, both of us coach all of their teams. And it just got us an opportunity to live in a community that we were a part of. And I also got a chance to meet a lot of their friends. So that's the main reason I started. It was because of family.” 

Increased cases of COVID-19 have hammered small business owners like the Bassett’s across Texas. 

“It hurt our business,” Bassett said. “I've had to lay off one or two employees, but we're managing to come to. What has helped a lot is our online orders. What we miss is people coming in. This is a small community and a lot of people like to come in, feel, touch and see the product. Not everyone is online shopper.” 

Being a Black business owner has its own unique set of challenges, particularly in a predominantly white community. 

“When we first started, we were young and in the community,” Bassett said. “So, a lot of people knew us. We coach several teams. We volunteer coach. We do. We've done a lot of things like that.” 

She said that involvement in the community has also been a blessing to their business. 

“People saw us as friends, not as business owners,” Bassett said. “Especially when you're minority-owned. You have to really prove yourself before they actually want to do business with you. They'll go somewhere online rather than shopping. Allen. But, you know, for the most part, the city has been supportive.” 

Bassett said despite the journey having its fair share of challenges, they’ve been able to stay in business for two decades. 

“So, that's a good thing,” Bassett said. 

To learn more about Squeegee’s, visit https://www.squeegeesscreenprinting.com/

This has been a VNN sponsored news story. For more information, email bhesson@verifiednews.network. 

Family business attributes success to community 

(FORT WORTH, Texas) Political animosity between traveling Trump supporters and Fort Worth locals boiled over at a voting location this week. 

A spokesperson for Black Shield Militia said Black militias, local law enforcement, and additional armed groups responded to an apparent disturbance this past Wednesday in front of the Charles F Griffin Building off Miller Ave near downtown Fort Worth. 

As the election nears around the corner, the Democratic party has bolstered efforts to increase voter enthusiasm in key battleground states with Democratic Vice-Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris making a three-city tour of Texas’ most embattled political cities. 

With her first stop in Fort Worth on Friday, counter protesters were reported trailing the VP nominee’s motorcade with many driving through an historically all-black neighborhood just a few miles from her stage at the Mt. Rose Baptist Church. According to eye witnesses, Trump supporters could be seen honking, making “doughnuts” in the streets, and allegedly yelling racial slurs and profanities as they drove by. 

In response, local Black militias and law enforcement congregated in front of the Charles F Griffin Building, a polling location, and began escorting locals to the polls. The most prominent Black Militia group present at the time was the Black Shield Militia. 

We spoke with Maurice Williams, a militia member, who told us the group was there to protect their community from voter intimidation and emphasized that the group was politically unaffiliated with either campaign. Organized and well-armed, the militiamen were seen controlling traffic and escorting locals across the street so that they can safely get to the polling stations. 

According to Williams, by the time they showed up the Trump supporters either left the area or were protesting outside of the Kamala Harris rally. 

Tarrant County’s Fort Worth, the first major metropolitan area the VP nominee visited, has become a prominent battleground city for both Democrats and Republicans. According to the political map developed by the Center for Urban Studies (https://urbanstudies.tcu.edu/mapping-the-presidential-election-in-dallas-fort-worth/), Democrats had a 14% voter increase in Tarrant County during the 2016 presidential election, compared to Obama’s 2012 presidential run. 

With shifting demographic changes in the suburban areas, both campaigns have made it a necessity to pour time and resources campaigning in the Lone Star state. This, however, has created an inevitable clash between supporters of both sides, prompting Texan Governor Gregg Abbott to announce his intent to mobilize the national guard on election night.

As the election nears closer, the threat of clashes between supporters continues to be a growing concern for local officials and law enforcement. 

Brian Hesson

Dallas doctor gets real about COVID-19 cases

Family business attributes success to community

Militias clash with Trump supporters during early voting in North Texas