The city of Paris, Texas, was exactly the kind of place Donald Trump had in mind when he pushed for a speedy reopening of the US economy.
Until late last month, there had been no coronavirus deaths and only a handful of cases among Paris’s roughly 25,000 residents, all of them linked to out-of-state travel. Despite the low case count, businesses had been forced to close, while the trail of tourists who once stopped to have their picture taken alongside the city’s scale model of the Eiffel Tower had dried up.
Then, at the end of April, a suspected outbreak ripped through one of the city’s nursing homes, prompting local officials to embark on a scramble to secure sorely needed tests.