4 March 30–april 5, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents New Normal Is Now Just Normal Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins looks back on when COVID-19 hit Dallas. BY KELLY DEARMORE D ressed sharply in a dark blue suit, Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins stood behind a lectern in the Dallas County Administration building on Sunday, March 22, 2020. His typically raspy voice was softer as he spoke. With a brow that remained furrowed throughout his re- marks that evening, Lewis Jenkins had the somber sound and look of a man weighed down by the worried eyes of millions. “I announce to you a difficult decision, but one based on science,” he said just after beginning the broadcast that had inter- rupted normal local television program- ming. “Dallas County will move to a safer-at-home order, this is also known as a shelter-in-place order.” Sitting in his office three years after that dramatic day, Lewis Jenkins recalls a lot about how hectic life was during Dallas County’s response to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His announcement of the order made the coronavirus go from a foreign news topic on television to a major player in living rooms across North Texas. “I remember the speed of it,” Lewis Jen- kins says about the week leading up to his order announcement. “I remember the very first order was ‘Hey, we’re not going to con- gregate in groups higher than a few hun- dred.’ And then the next thing we know, it was, ‘Guys, we need to close in-person din- ing.’ Then it sped up really quickly to the shelter-in-place order.” Indeed, things progressed quickly. An- nual March festivities, including the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, the South by Southwest music conference in Austin and even Dallas’ storied Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Parade were deleted from the calendar in rather swift fashion af- ter an increase in COVID-19 cases began be- ing reported in the United States during the first couple of weeks of March. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. “With everything going on then, it was a somber time,” he remembers when asked about his state of mind on that Sunday night. “We were having very weighty discussions. I haven’t looked back at the press coverage, but I’m sure I was somber. And a little sleep- deprived.” The headlines from the day he issued the shelter-in-place order explain why Lewis Jenkins had gone without much sleep in the days prior. The front page of The Dallas Morning News on March 22, 2020, was packed with timely headlines including “A Million Could Lose Jobs as Texas Eateries’ Tables Go Empty,” and “Sick Texans Wait- ing on Tests.” A couple of days before, the Observer ran an article about a Dallas police officer who had tested positive for the coro- navirus, something that felt life or death at the time, because for many, such a diagnosis in those days was life-threatening. During his press conference remarks, Lewis Jenkins discussed the importance of “flattening the curve.” He used visual aids to show projections for how possible numbers of county COVID-19 cases might compare with the number of available hospital beds. “Flatten the curve” was one of the more prominent new additions to the popular ver- nacular in the spring of 2020. Seemingly out of nowhere, terms such as “contactless de- livery,” “PPE,” “remote learning” and “livestream concert” became common. Opinions on Wuhan markets, toilet paper supply and whether hair salons should be open were hot debate topics long before all- things COVID vaccine took its lofty spot atop the sociopolitical divide. With bars, movie theaters and gyms closed, pro sports leagues inactive and concerts pushed into the virtual realm only, time for cable news-fueled online debate was more than plentiful. Lewis Jenkins was also often a topic of debate. As county judge, he became a bit of a political lightning rod, not unlike Dr. An- thony Fauci, then the director of the Na- tional Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. As a Democrat who oversaw the closing of certain businesses and gatherings, the county judge was a frequent target of Texas conservatives who claimed the gov- ernment was overreaching to control the spread of the virus. The judge says that since the start of the pandemic he could have tweeted a “a picture of a puppy or something, and I’ll get 20 or 30 responses that say ‘If that’s your puppy, I hope it dies.’” On the other side of the coin, however, as March 2020 rolled on, Lewis Jenkins didn’t mind expressing his opinions on the Republi- can leadership’s COVID response either. He still doesn’t mind doing so three years later. Lewis Jenkins remembers that during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 he and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, presented a united front that he says was received largely as a “bipartisan, non-politicized thing.” But by 2020 the climate was different, a climate that Lewis Jenkins says was fostered by both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and by the president at the time, Donald Trump. “That [bipartisan collaboration] was re- ally lacking early on,” he says. “And I think that started with the president. Early on I was told by friends at the CDC that they couldn’t talk to me about certain things, like what their research said about keeping peo- ple safe, but we were able to work around that. But early on that was a challenge, and things kept getting more political.” Perhaps the most attention-grabbing po- litical debate during the early part of the pandemic in North Texas involved a hair sa- lon owner named Shelley Luther. Lewis Jenkins says that Luther’s decision to keep her salon open in defiance of orders to close it gave residents a prime chance to pick sides, especially after the president and gov- ernor got involved. “Trump tweeted at him and Abbott just turned to jelly,” Lewis Jenkins says. “It be- came political then, and people were like, ‘By God, haircuts are important, and I don’t care about this public health emergency.’ Obviously it was financially detrimental to have businesses close, but you had people picking sides and looking for science that said to do something different than what the doctors at Baylor, UT Southwestern or the CDC were saying. There was a schism that’s still there today.” To avoid getting bogged down in the bad news of the day, Lewis Jenkins encouraged his team to spend at least 15 minutes each morn- ing doing something to center themselves. Meditating, praying, dog-walking or yoga — anything that would take their mind off the day-to-day tasks ahead. The judge also imple- mented what he calls a “buddy system,” where each person on his team had two other people checking in on them to make sure they were doing OK and getting enough sleep. The working hours of the day and night would offer plenty of time to get into the ar- guments, decisions and developments of the pandemic. Having the final say on if and when a county of more than 2.5 million peo- ple would go under a shelter-in-place order is something Lewis Jenkins wanted su- preme coherence for. “It was kind of weird, you know, I make decisions every day in the job that I have, but not decisions like that,” he says. “When the decisions are literally life and death situa- tion decisions every few minutes, maybe it was the adrenaline that kicked in or some- thing, but I had a clarity that maybe isn’t al- ways there when you’re deciding where to hang a picture in your office.” Lewis Jenkins admits that there are plenty of things he can look back on and know he would do differently should the need arise again. He says anyone who thinks they did everything perfect under such cir- cumstances is “delusional.” He’s proud of the times he and his team had to pivot or im- provise, including the time, he says, he reached out to Tito’s Vodka in Austin to manufacture much-needed hand sanitizer. As impactful of a decision as it was to is- sue the shelter-in-place order, Lewis Jen- kins had already decided how he would know it was time to hand the order down. Three years later, his decision-making pro- cess seems almost too simple, but there was nothing simple about March 2020. “I always had a level of certainty that we would follow science wherever it leads, that there’s infectious disease doctors and public health professionals who’ve trained their en- tire adult lives to advise us in these moments,” he says. “And so we were looking at evidence coming in and then acting aggressively on that evidence, rather than what Gov. Abbott did for the state 11 days after we did it here. Tarrant County and Denton County and the surround- ing counties did it right after we did it, so somebody had to go first, right?” ▼ CRIMINAL JUSTICE FREE AT LAST AFTER 25 YEARS IN PRISON, LOCAL MAN EXONERATED FOR 1997 DEEP ELLUM MURDER. BY KELLY DEARMORE M artin Santillan, now 49, was found guilty of capital murder and sen- tenced to life in prison for the 1997 shooting death of Damond Wittman. A rein- vestigation conducted by New Jersey | UNFAIR PARK | Mikel Galicia Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins remembers the difficult weeks and months from three years prior. >> p6
