Research is now showing a few things that could be game changers: 1. Sunlight kills the virus. https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-des...ould-still-last-through-summer-200745675.html 2. Gilead's drug can cure it 3. The young and healthy have VERY low odds of death, if they even catch it at all 4. The people to guard against are the elderly, obese, and those with major cardiovascular and respiratory problems. 5. COVID is really a regional problem in the NYC tri-state area. LIBERATE TEXAS
It's more of a symbol that Texas is liberated without being actually liberated. Then they can treat the people who think it's all clear when it really isn't
If you believe the scientists, the current model suggests Texas likely peaked a couple of days ago. I believe the original suggestions from the the science side were to start re-opening things 2-4 weeks after peak cases, assuming things were slowly/steadily declining. That seems to be the direction we're leaning towards. It seems to be what parts of Europe are going to start doing as well - I think Germany starts opening up next week, and Italy and others are looking at the coming weeks. Testing needs to improve certainly, but part of the announcement today was that they expect a dramatic ramp up in the next 7-10 days on the testing side of things. And then the next big decision day will be April 27th, which is when they decide to keep Shelter-in-Place or go back to "social distancing, under groups of 10". But they'll have testing info and 10 more days of data when they make that decision. Abbott sucks in general as a governor, but it's hard for me to find fault in this approach. On the flipside, there are a lot of health risks the other way too. A lot of people aren't getting treatment that would help them at doctors and hospitals because elective things have been cancelled. People aren't being screened for things that could benefit them. If you have a significant but not life-threatening ailment, you may avoiding getting it checked. That's not even considering mental health issues that will also grow the longer people are stuck at home. One of the elements of "re-opening" next week is allowing elective surgeries because doctors and clinics are not doing anything right now. That's a huge positive. There are no good answers here - at some point, whether its next week or next month or 4 months from now, the economy is going to have to start re-opening and the virus is still going to be here. So if we're not even comfortable opening up a little bit today, I'm not sure why we would in a month or two. And at that point, a ton of people will have suffered unrelated health consequences.
I don't see much business opening that weren't already open. But anyway THANK YOU. Someone must go ahead and take the lead. Brave and fearless lab rat. Thank you for being the guinea pig.
Not a huge fan of Abbott/Patrick in general, but I agree with these steps. Opening state parks is great and so is allowing hospitals to continue with elective surgeries.
Good thing he closed the State Parks 11 days ago. I'm sure that helped. All things considered, he didn't do anything too terribly stupid here, much less idiotic than his "we don't want you to go to church but we won't stop you" decree. I don't see how much has changed. In other State news:
Way too early, what was so hard about May 1? We already saw large groups of people playing contact sports in parks in March when there was a lax attitude towards quarantining or social distancing. Whenever I've been out and about, there's a pretty lax attitude towards social distancing when you're not inside a store. Enough people wear the gear and still do things wrong. Opening retail for curbside instead of delivery isn't going to change anything economically... far more risk than reward, lots of overweight unhealthy people in Texas ripe for the picking.
Texas Republicans Have Spectacularly Failed the Coronavirus Test My faith in their ability to fix this mess is lower than the water levels in West Texas creek beds in August. By Mimi Swartz Contributing Opinion Writer HOUSTON — Usually, I think the eternal optimism I inherited from my father is a blessing, especially now, when faced with many more weeks under pandemic house arrest. The memory of Dad’s perpetual hopefulness has helped me to remind myself that this, too, will pass, and that maybe we as a society will emerge stronger and wiser. Then I remember where I am: in Texas, where our Republican elected officials are supposed to be getting us through this epic nightmare. I’m not singling out one political party over another, but the Republicans do have a stranglehold on state government here. To paraphrase an old saying, they bought it, they broke it, and my faith in their ability to fix it — “it” being not just recovery from a public health disaster but also from the economic fallout that will follow — is lower than the water levels in West Texas creek beds in August. Where to start? Topping the list has to be our governor, Greg Abbott, who was so slow to accept that there was such a thing as the coronavirus that Texas ranks near the bottom in a WalletHub report on pandemic responsiveness by states. It was a cool jujitsu move, the way a governor who has spent most of his term trying to take power away from urban centers has suddenly become so magnanimous about letting Democratic mayors and county officials handle this crisis. Mr. Abbott also thinks it’s just fine to let people mingle at church out in the country, even though the absence of health care in rural Texas is well known. He has his priorities. Mr. Abbott and our state attorney general, Ken Paxton, wasted no time protecting the unborn by trying to close abortion clinics during the pandemic while showing far less concern for full grown, desperately ill adults. (Abortion rights groups have taken them to court and won — so far.) It was a Democrat, Judge Clay Jenkins of Dallas County, who was among the first Texas officials to institute a shelter-in-place order, on March 23. Meanwhile, his Republican counterpart a few miles down the road in Tarrant County, Glen Whitley, refused to close down businesses, claiming: “This is not a deadly disease. Yes, there are folks dying, but I’m just not going to do it.” He finally relented near the end of that month. Most of you probably heard the eloquent and altruistic words of our lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, the former TV broadcaster and talk show host who used to toot horns, ring cowbells and wear crazy hats until he got elected to the legislature and transformed himself into a pious and zealous defender of separate public restrooms for the sexes. Mr. Patrick volunteered to sacrifice himself and every other American over 70 by claiming he was ready to “get back to work” and “all in” on a hypothetical: “As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” For a lot of reasons we are lucky — and grateful — that no one took Mr. Patrick up on his offer, but the luckiest septuagenarian of all may be Mr. Patrick himself, who would have been forced to find a way to weasel out of the patently empty promise he made in the first place. And then there is Senator John Cornyn, who urged his constituents not to panic by posting a photo of a Corona beer on March 14, just after the number of cases in Texas rose to over 2,200. Then, on March 18, he blamed China for the virus by stating that the people there “eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that” and diseases get transmitted from animals to people. But Mr. Cornyn was also at his finger-wagging best in early April, when he also explained his opposition to a vote-by-mail push by asserting that “if you can go to the grocery store, you can go to the polls.” Ted Cruz recently told Fox News that the mainstream media was “trying to root for disaster.” Both senators have just been named to a White House task force to open the economy, which makes me feel not one iota safer. My particular favorite, though, is Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas who published a very long column on March 16 on the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website headlined “The Coronavirus Hoax.” There just weren’t enough people with the disease to warrant the incursion into our civil liberties, he warned. That was just about a week before his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, came down with the faux virus himself. (See part 2)
(part 2) I will say in defense of my state that none of these people are stupid; they aren’t the stereotypical yahoos that so many non-Texans like to imagine live among us in droves. No. They represent the stubborn if expediently applied strain of anti-government independence that is inherent in the Texas character, which conveniently dovetails with being a Trump toady. Mr. Abbott’s fealty to the president, along with that of our senators, could mean that Texans could become the public health guinea pigs who will suffer mightily if the state opens too soon. What all this behavior will mean in a state that is slowly turning purple is anyone’s guess. We are lucky that, thanks to local stay-in-place orders and a comparative lack of density in our cities, the number of Texas cases is “only” over 16,000, with deaths at over 390. But we are not at peak, experts tell us, and meanwhile over one million Texans have filed for unemployment. That’s a number that will cause a lot of restiveness here, and maybe some reflection on just how much actual leadership Republican leaders have displayed during this awful time. Not that leadership hasn’t been on display in other quarters. Some of the slack has been taken up by the private sector, with restaurant and small-business owners banding together to help their colleagues and trying their best to fill in for a government that is M.I.A. The big businesses have gotten into the act, too, in particular HEB, a San Antonio-based grocery store chain that has become a lifesaver during the kinds of climate emergencies that have become the new normal here (see: Hurricane Harvey, 2017). As my colleagues Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes reported recently in Texas Monthly, HEB has had a pandemic and influenza plan since 2005, when it first took note of the H5N1 threat. The chain put that plan in effect in 2009 when the H1N1 swine flu hit. The company started looking at what was happening in Wuhan, China, in January and began instituting plans to keep its supply chains functioning, its shelves stocked and its employees safe. “We’re here to take care of our partners, take care of our customers, take care of our community,” said Justen Noakes, HEB’s director of emergency preparedness. What a novel idea. Dad would be so proud. (Ms Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly, grew up in San Antonio, and lives in Houston with her husband and the kids. She knows Texas and Texas politics.)
Good news, new case growth has plateaued, shockingly, so has testing capacity: You can't logically mention Texas or any US state with Germany or any country that has eased restrictions, becuase our testing capacity is still not at the level of other developed countries, and the federal government currently has no plans to fix this. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/were-testing-the-wrong-people/610234/ COVID-19 testing has been an unmitigated failure in this country. This month, according to the COVID Tracking Project, a data initiative launched by The Atlantic in March, the number of tests performed in the United States has plateaued at about 130,000 to 160,000 a day. Rather than growing rapidly—as all experts think is absolutely necessary—the daily number of tests administered in some jurisdictions has even decreased. In New York, for instance, 10,241 tests were performed on April 6, but supply limits forced a huge drop a few days later to 25 total tests. Quest Diagnostics, one of the two biggest firms that run tests, just furloughed 9 percent of its workforce. In addition, news reports suggest that, as of last week, 90 percent of the 15-minute tests developed by Abbott Laboratories are idle due to a lack of necessary reagents and qualified personnel. Testing bottlenecks such as these are major obstacles to getting Americans out of their homes and back on the job. How many tests do we need in order to safely relax social-distancing measures, reopen nonessential businesses and schools, and allow large gatherings? According to the Morgan Stanley analyst Matthew Harrison and the Harvard professor Ashish Jha, we should be conducting a minimum of 500,000 tests a day. One of the authors of this article, Paul Romer, has called for the capacity to run 20 million to 30 million tests a day. Even this has been criticized as insufficient for the task of identifying enough of the asymptomatic spreaders to keep the pandemic in check.
the Austin UT model (recent) gave it a 10s % that it has peaked, 50s % that it will peak in a week, 60s% that it will peak in 2 weeks
I'm completely OK with this. We can't keep the country in a holding pattern until a vaccine is ready. We're gonna have to get moving in some form, it's not as if he's saying back to business as usual. Regardless of whether it's now, or 3 months from now there's gonna be a spike as soon as we let people out, it's unavoidable. I would rather it be now and avoid 3 months of complete economic stagnation. I have yet to hear a single decent plan that actually has an endgame between now and vaccine time that doesn't involve likely economic disaster or some deaths.
Depends. Will the Civil Rights Act, 14th Amendment, Shelley v. Kramer, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, Sweatt v. Painter, Gideon v. Wainwright or Miranda v. Arizona still have standing in these hipster bailiwicks where straight, white evangelicals still own and run all the commercial real estate, apartment buildings and residential HOAs, issue all the bank loans and attend and run all school board meetings?
That's because those are the givens, there's no positive option here. This is a chapter in a social studies textbook, not a CNBC segment.
I'm fine with it too, given where we are at now. I think it's completely unacceptable given where we could have been. 3-4 weeks wasted without a real plan and lack of a system of rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation plan. That's a plan that many countries have had good success with. Maybe that can still happen in a few weeks, but i doubt it now. This lack increases the risk of yo-yo-ing between opening up and closing down. I think the system should have been a fed program but the admin has abdicated its responsibility.
