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Is the dying daily, known as The Brownsville Herald, on a ventilator as COVID reduces the paper to a few breathless articles while the plague decimates the community? Why aren't the reporters doing their jobs and printing the facts.

Why is the newspaper allowing Cameron County Judge Eddie "Panocha" Treviño to report false numbers day after day?

Why is the newspaper allowing Dr. Jaime Castillo, the county's health director, whine like a little bitch that the challenge is too overwhelming for him and accept his pusillanimous palaver as an acceptable excuse?

Why is the newspaper allowing City Hall to keep the citizenry in the dark by not reporting its own numbers when the mayor and city commission are observing firsthand that the county is failing us?

Why isn't the newspaper sending reporters to Valley Regional Medical Center and Valley Baptist Medical Center and detailing the sordid conditions at both hospitals that are adding rather than subtracting from the death total because the understaffed facilities are deluged by a tsunami of patients? Hurricane Hanna may have hit us yesterday, but Hurricane Coronavirus hit our hospitals weeks ago and no amount of sandbags is stopping the flood of cadavers.

Why isn't the newspaper sending reporters into Matamoros to ascertain the pandemic's widespread infections to further educate its readers on the extent and dangerousness of the virus?

We're tired of the numbers. An unmasked President Trump reports more than 145,000 dead and more than four million cases and it's a meaningless number to him other than that the figures, not the deaths, are threatening his reelection.

We're tired of the numbers. Governor Abbott, who refuses to stand on his own two feet and cowers in his wheel chair because the president has put the fear of Satan in him, laments that almost 5,000 Texans are dead and 500,000 have tested positive. He thinks mouthing his empty condolences are a sufficient response when he should be issuing common sense mandates to thwart the plague's spread.

In Brownsville we're coming face-to-face with the numbers. They are meaningless. The people we knew who are now dead were never numbers in our lives. They were family. They were friends. They were individuals whom we hugged and kissed. Though the president, the governor, the county judge, the mayor and the Herald feel they escape responsibility by printing false deaths stats, we are left to cry, to suffer and to fear for our own well-being and that of our fellow humans.

We know the president has failed us by refusing to lead by example after his incompetency set us up for the kill. We know the governor has failed us by permitting Trump to intimidate him into reopening too early. But they are easy scapegoats.

Our county judge has failed us. Our mayor has failed us. The dying daily has maintained its negligent tradition by failing us with its dismissal of accountability and transparency; it fears angering its most important advertisers.

Brownsville is the Third World Capital of the United States; those in power have treated us like fools. By keeping us ignorant, they have cost us millions of our taxpayer dollars.

Now they are costing us our lives.