Yes, since July. Mask Laws - COVID-19 & Texas Law - Guides at Texas State Law Library But really, the big concern shouldn't just be the mask mandate, but lifting all restrictions when we are almost ALMOST there.
I agree we should have a mask mandate (nationally, really), but I will present a flipside to the "they opened up too early" thing. We have 50 states, all of which pursued a wide range of policies from almost doing nothing to hard and long lockdowns. As of right now, it's unclear how much impact any of it had - the worst hit states and the least hit states both seem to have a jumble of restrictive and non-restrictive policies. California, Ohio, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Colorado, for example, were credited for really impressive responses early. And yet, in the end, their results are similar to Texas, Georgia, and Florida, which all had the opposite responses. That doesn't mean those restrictions don't help if followed - they almost certainly do. We won't know the real answers for years, most likely, when deeper research can be conducted - there's so many factors like population density, weather, etc that may play a role too. But it's possible that the states with more restrictive policies also had more rebellion against those policies, causing as many new problems as they solved. Sort of like prohibition and alcohol or any other black market activity. If you prohibit instead of regulate, you may get the opposite effect than intended. The "smart solution" to protect Texans (or anyone else) may not be as obvious as it seems.
If the Governor lifts masks and restrictions, the purpose isn't to stop the spread or do what doctors are advising. July seems far more logical to me. Masks help stop the spread, and we are nowhere close to immunizing 29 million Texans.
1K and 50? That's probably well into 2022. Projection is we will be hovering around 4-40k daily cases starting Summer. Death rate should be much lower given vaccination priority. I think decision should be more about death rate than # of cases. Path to Herd Immunity - COVID-19 Vaccine Projections | COVID-19 Projections Using Machine Learning (covid19-projections.com)
We should probably have a mask mandate well into 2022 then, but to be clear I was just referencing Texas's numbers, not the entire country.
Having recently driven through rural Texas and Lubbock, I can tell you that most of the state gave up on masks a long time ago.
I hate the dam mask but come on , this is to early. At least where I live people have done a good job wearing the masks in the stores and restaurants, IMHO this is a huge mistake and one that doesn't need to be made just yet.......why all of a sudden is the Gov doing this, let the cities decide, well make a better decision.
Greg Abbott, the leader of getting back to spreading all our new strains of Covid, because that's the GOP way! Vote him out. Vote out Paxton, Cruz, and the rest out next time they run. Well, Paxton might be behind bars by then if he ever goes to trial for his felony charges.
Eventually, we will know but the theory to me is not that hard. Over time, in a fully open society like ours, one state impact all other states. See variants - there was no way to contain them even with international travel restrictions. Eventually, the dominant strain takes over once it has a chance to spread to your country, to your state, to your local county, etc. Local policies can only help mitigate but given enough time, all communities will be impacted exactly the same way without a uniform federal response and policy. We did this all wrong from the very start. National testing, trace, isolation policy is a minimum and we gave up on that a long long time ago. Anyway, as for this, there are now new variants and they will spread faster and is deadlier. The new short-term race is between the dominant strain taking a good stronghold vs vaccination. A few more months is "easy" given how long we have been at this. Just stupidity IMO on Abbot to rescind masks and all restrictions at this time. Especially masks given how simple it is.
**** Abbot, if he were not in a wheel chair he would be much more harshly judged....the guy is directly responsible for last week's deaths in the energy grid breakdowns. He is a laying sack of **** that blames WRONG that wind generation was a problem on Fox. The guy has been HORRIBLE for Texas.... DD
Saw this coming a mile away. The ONLY saving grace is that this wasn't the "Zombie" virus else we'd all been finished months ago while DJT was still President...
Yeah so I read this as pure politics... hoping that the Biden admin takes the bate, and comments or issues some sort of mask order they can have a fake fight over that bleeds into FoxNews' cycle. Abbott knows he's in deep doodoo with the ERCOT nonsense. He knows he's looked at as a failure. He knows he's not going to win one single Dem vote with the way he has decided to tie himself to Trumpism since winning in 2018. He knows he needs to rally support from the Trumper crazies in Texas and the larger GOP white nationalist cult. This is a way to pick a fight with Biden in a way that rallies support from the right. THATS IT. Nothing is going to change because Abbott cannot force businesses, and school districts to do a damn thing differently. He also was never imposing any sort of oversight and penalties to businesses not enforcing the mandates. So this is all for show, and a way to pick a fight with Biden that he thinks helps him politically. It's disgusting, and there's a special place in hell for someone like Abbott who plays politics with peoples lives during a pandemic. F$ck that guy.
Sure - but if you have two states and one requires everyone to wear masks everywhere, and the other doesn't require anyone to. Even if people are traveling between the states, the one with the mask requirement should have less cases because while people will have it, they aren't spread it as much. But that's not necessarily what we have seen in the US so far. (I'm using mask mandate as shorthand here for all the different restrictions - business capacity, etc). I agree we screwed up and should have a national policy, etc. We KNOW that works because we've seen it in other countries. But that's besides the point here - we ended up with 50 different petri dishes experimenting in different ways, and the results were not really as different as anyone would have expected. If Georgia and Florida have been open the whole time and everyone's running around without masks, they *should* be doing worse than a state that has been really strict the whole time. But that's not necessarily what we're seeing. Regardless of policy, states are having similarly massive outbreaks, all on their own timetables but still happening across the board and with similar peaks and troughs. EDIT: we also know mask mandates, closures, etc work in other countries where they are not controversial. The issue in the US is that these policies ARE controversial - so there's a more nuanced question of what really gets the best results. If you back off a bit but get a higher compliance rate, do you come out better? That's what my original post was about.
what's crazy is that you're already so close to a better place...vaccinations ramping up, numbers dropping. Even after a couple of months, if trends continue, this makes more sense. Vaccines will be widely available by summer. it's like they see things getting better and are like "OH, We can't have that now can we" and does more stupid ****
I'm overly sympathetic toward the physically and mentally handicapped but I hope this mfer fingers lock up when he rolls his chair down down a steep hill ...
