8 months of COVID: Houstonians look back on how their lives have changed
8 months of COVID: Houstonians look back on how their lives have changed
Dec. 17, 2020
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Realtor Katie Day grabs flyers out of a drawer in a model home in a new development she is marketing in Houston.Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
As the coronavirus began to exert its grip on the region in late April, Chronicle reporters asked Houstonians to tell the stories of how their lives had been affected. The virus then was scary and novel, and we were still trying to figure out what it meant for our health, our livelihoods and our families. Eight months on, as vaccines have just begun to ship, we went back to some of those people to see how their lives had been altered by the pandemic. These are their words, edited for space and clarity.
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Ian Druke holds a sign during a protest regarding evictions going on at the court, 6000 Chimney Rock Rd., Friday, Aug. 21, 2020, in Houston.Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
As the end of a federal order designed to protect renters from eviction looms at the end of the month, the Texas Organizing Project gathered on the steps of City Hall on a rainy Tuesday to demand the mayor protect renters.
“Mayor Turner, we need you to take action. We need you to do something,” said Rai Prysock, a TOP member. “Please tell us what you plan on doing to keep people in their homes.”
Turner: Nearly 1 in 7 Houstonians have been infected with coronavirus
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Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner leads a press conference at the Houston City Hall, Monday, Dec. 14, 2020, about the upcoming arrival of COVID-19 vaccines to Houston’s hospitals and about an antibody testing survey that reveled that one in seven Houstonians have been infected with the coronavirus.Marie D. De Jesús, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographerShow MoreShow Less
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Vasanthi Avadhanula, Ph.D, shows Dr. Pedro Piedra, coronavirus test results in a lab on Thursday, April 9, 2020 at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. BCM is working on an experimental therapy transfusing the blood plasma of people who’ve recovered from COVID-19 into patients fighting the disease. Baylor and the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center are partnering to make the potentially therapeutic plasma available to hospitals that get the Food and Drug Administration’s permission to transfuse it into pati
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Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children s Hospitals Center for Vaccine Development, poses for a photograph outside the lab Thursday, June 18, 2020, in Houston.Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
New vaccines are on the horizon but is it too late to blunt the pandemic’s winter surge? Might Houston fare better than the rest of Texas? And why could a traditional-method vaccine be better for kids?
To answer these questions, we once again check in with vaccine researcher Peter Hotez, one of the country’s best explainers of COVID-19 science. He’s a professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and he co-directs the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, where his lab team is developing COVID-19 vaccines.