Houston health leaders dismiss talk of reopening.

Hints that Abbott might call for businesses to resume normal service have some worried

Houston health leaders are putting in place a nuanced coronavirus reopening strategy that probably points to sometime in midMay as a realistic commencement, roughly 10 days later than the start date Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to announce Monday.

The leaders pointedly dismissed talk of dates, instead emphasizing certain benchmarks — the number of novel coronavirus cases, the availability of diagnostic tests and the capacity to conduct contact tracing — that need to improve significantly before the Houston region would be able to manage continuing cases of COVID-19. Those benchmarks seem unlikely to be attained by May 4, the day Abbott hinted during a radio interview Wednesday that he will reopen “massive amounts of businesses” that have been closed since March 31.

“The last thing we want is to waste all the great foresight and decisions we’ve made by ignoring the data and prematurely reopening wide,” said William McKeon, president of the Texas Medical Center. “It would be terrible for the community to respond so well, averting what happened in New York, and then find ourselves in a situation where we’re in our surge capacity and not able to offer citizens a bed, ventilator and care they deserve.”

Dr. Paul Klotman, president of Baylor College of Medicine, added that plans should be based on “what’s happening with the pandemic, not dates we want to reopen. We can’t control this,” he said. “We can’t mandate arbitrary scheduling to a virus.”

The Houston health leaders, who are informally advising local government officials, say the number of Houston-area COVID-19 cases need to head in a sustained downward trajectory and drop from the current total of 200 to 250 new cases a day to less than 100; the amount of testing conducted daily needs to at least triple; and local health departments need to bring on and train more than 1,000 additional employees to find people who came in contact with individuals infected with the virus.

Efforts to develop a road map to reopening come as Houston and Texas appear to have fended off COVID-19’s initial attack reasonably well. Houston-area hospitals never had to invoke plans to enlist freed-up beds because a surge of patients never came and a prominent COVID-19 model now projects that the disease will claim