Abbott easing COVID rules
Bars still closed, but most businesses can allow 75% occupancy
Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Thursday a new round of business reopenings, including restaurants, gyms and nursing homes, as the state continues to see a drop in infections and hospitalizations from the coronavirus.
The reopenings apply to every region except Victoria, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, where hospitals still are dealing with large numbers of infected patients. Hospitals in the greenlighted regions also are allowed to return to normal operations; elective procedures had been restricted while the state fought to overcome a summer surge of COVID-19 cases.
Abbott said the state would allow most businesses to reopen at 75 percent of their maximum occupancy in those regions where COVID-19 patients make up less than 15 percent of the total people hospitalized. Bars still are prohibited from reopening, though some have been able to work around the restriction in recent weeks by rebranding as restaurants with sit-down service.
“Texans have shown that we can address both the health and safety
concerns of COVID-19 while also taking careful, measured steps to restore the livelihoods that Texans depend on,” Abbott said in his first statewide briefing on the pandemic in months.
The new regional threshold marks a significant shift for the Republican governor as the state’s pandemic response moves into the fall, with flu season arriving and many schools about to reopen for in-person instruction. He previously resisted committing to a regional approach and had said he would rely on a range of metrics — not just hospitalizations — to determine policies.
But the state’s health agency has been dogged by data backlogs, and some counties said they had lost confidence in state metrics such as the number of new daily infections and the percent of positive COVID-19 tests, also known as the positivity rate. While the state has remedied at least some of the issues, hospitalization data have been more reliable throughout the pandemic.
Other large states, including New York and California, are currently using regional reopening plans based on several criteria, including new cases and test positivity. Public health experts caution against relying on hospitalizations alone because they lag behind infections and therefore provide a delayed glimpse into the community spread of the virus.
All but two of the state’s 22 hospital regions previously surpassed the new 15 percent threshold, according to the state’s calculation. The governor did not provide the methodology for how officials calculated the percentages, and a spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about how the benchmark was selected.
The state has reported nearly 700,000 infections since March and nearly 14,500 deaths, a toll similar to that in other large states, including California and Florida. New York has reported fewer infections but more deaths, stemming from a surge earlier this year.
Texas has been below 10 percent test positivity for at least two weeks now. Earlier this week, state health officials unveiled a new method of calculating the rate, which shows it first dropped below 10 percent in mid-August. Abbott has said before that he would consider further reopenings once the state remained below that threshold for two weeks.
Under the new plan, more nursing homes and assisted living facilities will be able to reopen for essential visits starting next week. The decision will come as a huge relief to some friends and relatives who have been unable to come in close contact with loved ones for months.
Nursing homes in several counties have been ordered to begin testing staff regularly, and Abbott said those that have high infection rates will be forced to close down visitations going forward.
Democrats immediately blasted the governor for abandoning earlier metrics and for failing to provide health care relief to hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed Texans.
“Gov. Abbott’s press conference today was notable for what he didn’t say,” House Democratic Caucus Chair Chris Turner, DGrand Prairie, said in a statement. “There was no mention of a contact-tracing program, no mention of improving the state’s unreliable data and no mention of expanding Medicaid to increase access to health care for the millions of Texans who are uninsured.”
Restaurants and bars have been among the hardest-hit industries in the pandemic, and several bar owners sued the governor this summer, trying to throw out his emergency restrictions. Abbott said Thursday that across the nation, bars have been hot spots for spreading the virus.
Alba Huerta, owner of Julep craft cocktail bar in Houston, said the governor’s office continues to imperil the industry by not allowing bars to reopen and failing to offer solutions for how to protect them.
“It’s like we’re invisible to the governor,” said Huerta, a leading figure on the national bartending scene. “I’ve never in my life been this disappointed with local government and their continual disregard for people and businesses that are hanging on by a string. How is it possible that you can keep one particular business closed for months when there’s some kind of lifeline for others?”