COVID-Wise, Will All Of America Be Like Texas? Or Much Worse-- Like Florida?

On Friday, Texas had a relatively good day in the new case department, "only" 8,552 confirmed new cases. Yesterday there were 7,735 more, bringing the total to 393,683 in total-- 13,577 cases per million Texans. The population of the state is around 29.9 million, about half as many people as Italy, which is one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. But with twice as many people, Italy only has 245,864 cases (4,067 cases per million Italians). So far 35,102 Italians have died and both new cases and new deaths have petered out (only 274 new cases yesterday and 5 new deaths). The pandemic is still relatively young and virulent in Texas, which has already had over 5,000 deaths and 135 new deaths announced yesterday). It's going to get much worse in Texas, although it doesn't have to. At least it wouldn't have to if Texas wasn't so tightly controlled by aggressively science-denying Republican politicians, all vying with each other to see who can be the most extreme and the furthest up Trump's ass.

With dozens of sheriffs telling Abbott they refuse to enforce his mask mandate, there's a new wrinkle in Texas Republicans' assertion that they have the right to spread the contagion no matter how many people they kill. Late yesterday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that "Almost 800 bar owners across the state will participate in Freedom Fest, an event where bar owners will defy Abbott’s June 26 order that closed bars as the state’s coronavirus numbers surged." Bars that open illegally could see their liquor license suspended but no one expects that to actually happen.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Elizabeth Findell asked Will Texas Shut Down Again Amid Surge in Covid-19 Cases?. "In Houston, where booming Covid-19 cases have pushed many hospitals beyond their intensive-care unit capacity for the first time," she reported, "doctors have been sounding alarms for weeks. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the Democratic elected executive of the county which includes the nation’s fourth-largest city, has been pushing to again implement stay-home orders there. Face coverings, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made mandatory this month, remain a lightning rod of controversy. The divide over policies to combat Covid-19 has only deepened in a state where politicians have been at war for months. The governor, who has seen his approval ratings tumble, has struggled to form a consistent public-health response to the crisis as he is buffeted from both right and left. Democrats want tougher restrictions, while many Republicans fear he has already gone too far, leaving him bouncing between policies and yet having appeased no one.

In recent weeks, Mr. Abbott has vacillated between denying another state shutdown is imminent and warning Texans that it will be necessary if things don’t improve.

“I know that many of you are frustrated,” the governor told the state GOP at its virtual convention last week. “So am I. I know that many of you don’t like the mask requirement. Neither do I. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. Actually, next to last. The last thing is lock Texas down again. We must do all we can to prevent that, but every day the facts get worse.”

In Texas, the average number of new Covid-19 cases confirmed each day jumped from around 1,000 in late April and early May to more than 10,000 on many days in July, but has begun to taper slightly. The proportion of tests that are positive, which health experts say should be below 5%, has been nearly 15%. Texans are now dying of the disease at a rate of nearly 140 a day, and more than 4,500 [5,059] have died of it total.

Texas’s largest cities, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin have all seen significant virus spread, with average daily new cases per 100,000 people ranging from 20 to 60 in the past week. The Rio Grande Valley, meanwhile, has seen death rates six times the state as a whole. But some rural counties, especially in the western part of the state, have remained relatively unaffected.

Texas, like Georgia, Florida and Arizona, was relatively spared for the first months of the virus and then saw a rapid rise in cases following Memorial Day, after reopening from fairly short lockdowns. Over the past week, the proportion of positive tests those states have seen was 16%, 19% and 25%, respectively.

Like Florida and Arizona, Texas has closed bars and limited both indoor dining and large gatherings. Texas also has a mask mandate for most residents, unlike Arizona and Florida, which don’t.

In Houston, the 60 hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, a medical district considered the largest in the world, have exceeded their normal ICU capacity for the first time in memory and are using 17 of 273 beds added for a “phase two” surge, said Chief Executive William McKeon. The tide of incoming patients is slowing slightly, he said, after the mask mandate.

Despite the rise in Covid-19 cases in Houston, the state Republican party pushed to hold its mid-July 2020 convention in person there, ultimately losing a showdown with Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat.

“This is a convention that Trump wants,” Leslie Thomas, a member of the state’s Republican Party executive committee, said as she voted on July 2 to hold the event in person. “Like it or not, Texas is the Republican state. We bear that. So we need to stand our ground.”

In a recent interview, Ms. Thomas said her vote, weeks before President Trump canceled an in-person convention in Jacksonville, reflected his views on live events, along with her belief that in-person conversations are key to a convention. She said she wasn’t concerned about risks from the virus, likening the convention to going to Walmart.

Mr. Turner blocked the convention, calling it far too dangerous for thousands of people to gather together indoors. The GOP fought it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, but didn’t obtain the right to go forward. Instead, the party scrambled to hold the event online, where it struggled to get past repeated computer errors.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, state Republicans participating in the online convention voted to replace their party chairman with Allen West, an Army veteran and onetime Florida congressman known for his firebrand style. His statement before the vote derided Mr. Abbott’s Covid-related executive orders as “the despotism, the tyranny that we see in the great state of Texas.”

The view reflects the ire of some of Mr. Abbott’s fellow Republicans in response to making masks mandatory. Some consider such requirements unconstitutional. Local Republican parties in a handful of counties approved censure resolutions to condemn the governor’s move.

Ms. Hidalgo first required masks in the Houston area in April, following other Texas counties and cities. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, called it “the ultimate government overreach” and local Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican, said penalties could “lead to unjust tyranny.” The Houston Police Officer’s Union called the rules “draconian” and sought a ruling on whether they were legal. Looking back in a recent interview, Ms. Hidalgo said the order was the beginning of a political battle.

“But I didn’t realize how much it would grow,” she said. “It was a harbinger of things to come.”

Typical of Texas politics, which is often marked by tugs-of-war between Republican leaders of the state and Democratic leaders of its largest cities, Mr. Abbott overturned the mask mandates of Harris and other counties when he began reopening the state in May.

Two months later, however, after the number of Covid cases diagnosed each day had increased eightfold, he issued his own statewide mandate requiring face masks. Last month he was also forced to walk back the reopening, closing bars for a second time and reducing restaurant capacity.

Houston resident Kiersten Tapia, 32, said the state reopened too quickly, “like it was red light to green.” She remains a supporter of Mr. Abbott, whom she has long liked, but is concerned the changing requirements regarding masks led many in her area of central northwest Houston to take fewer precautions than she did.

“It was confusing,” she said of the mask shifts. “They should have started out with them being mandatory.”

David Van Delden, however, an owner of 14 bars in Austin, Dallas and Houston, said the state moved too quickly to reverse its reopening and shut bars down again, leaving him unable to pay his workers. Instead, he said, there should have been stronger attempts to enforce rules regarding capacity and distancing at bars.

“You can’t pick and choose who is shut down,” he said. “We need to open back up and people need to be more responsible for their own actions.”

Mr. Abbott, the most popular politician in Texas and one of the most popular governors in the nation, has seen the effects of the virus crisis on his favor. Approval of his handling of the virus has fallen from 60% in late April to 44% in late June, according to the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, a joint project of four major universities which has surveyed governor approval ratings in all states. Texans’ opinions of their governor are now in the bottom fifth of U.S. states, according to the report.

Some local Democratic officials, meanwhile, are now beginning to test the limits of Mr. Abbott’s authority. In Hidalgo County, on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, which has seen a death rate this month six times that of the state, County Judge Richard Cortez, a Democrat, said Monday he will issue a new stay-home order for nonessential employees.

Mr. Cortez acknowledged in an interview on local radio station KURV that such an order contradicts the state’s reopening-- so he has no way to enforce it. Asked whether he expects a punitive response from Austin, Mr. Cortez replied “I don’t know.”

Monday, Mr. Abbott tweeted that “the mask mandate is successfully slowing the spread of Covid-19 in North Texas” and “a community lock down is not needed as long as masks & other distancing strategies are used.”

Mr. Crenshaw, the congressman who had taken aim at Ms. Hidalgo’s mask mandate, retweeted it, with the comment “This is good news.”

Mike Siegel, the Democratic candidate for a central Texas congressional seat that goes from north Austin all the way into the exurbs of Houston (TX-10), told me that Abbott and his own opponent, Michael McCaul "only care about regular people when election time comes around. It was nearly June, the second half of this year, when McCaul began acknowledging the seriousness of COVID-19. In fact, the three month anniversary was yesterday, of him speaking on the House floor with no mask on. Even now he refuses to acknowledge the poor performance of the Trump administration in handling the virus and passes all the blame away. We need a Congress that cares about the people all the time and especially during a pandemic. Not some one so out of touch that one of that one of their largest campaign expenses is limousine services."