“This was the first wave of the virus in Texas, centered on the meatpacking plants that run north from Amarillo toward Oklahoma. Each plant, in the early months of the pandemic, represented both a concentrated outbreak and an amplification of the problems that have become familiar across the United States: the confusion of messaging, the conflict between life and commerce, the conspiracy theories and the outright denial. Unless you were there, on the front lines, in the hospitals or in the hardest-hit communities, it all seemed invisible and abstract.” The New Yorker: How Two Waves of Coronavirus Cases Swept Through the Texas Panhandle.