Abbott order: ‘Time to open Texas 100 percent’
S.A. leaders call ending mask mandate, occupancy limits hasty
Citing vaccinations on the rise and severe infections from the coronavirus pandemic declining, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Tuesday he will lift the state’s mask mandate next week and allow businesses to operate at full capacity.
“It is now time to open Texas 100 percent,” Abbott said, sounding celebratory.
Public health experts and elected leaders in San Antonio called it a bad idea given still-limited access to vaccines and warned that the pandemic was far from over.
“We’re going to have a lot more people die and we’re going to have a lot more people getting sick,” predicted Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
Imploring local residents to keep wearing masks, he and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg called the rollback, set to begin March 10, hasty and dangerous.
It will end occupancy limits for restaurants, bars, sporting events, retailers and wherever people gather.
“Opening everything to 100 percent while simultaneously nixing our mask mandate is a huge mistake,” Nirenberg said in a tweet. “You don’t cut off your parachute just as you’ve slowed your descent.”
Speaking to business leaders at a packed restaurant in Lubbock, the Republican governor cautioned Texans to continue following recommended guidelines, including distancing and wearing face coverings. Few of the attendees appeared to be following either recommendation.
“This does not remove personal responsibility,” Abbott said. “Personal vigilance is still needed to contain COVID. It’s just that now, state mandates are no longer needed.”
Abbott said local officials can enact their own restrictions if the pandemic worsens. County judges can impose some restrictions like mask mandates and occupancy limits of up to 50 percent if COVID-19 patients make up more than 15 percent of all local hospitalizations.
But the governor left no way for local authorities to enforce those measures, making them “meaningless,” Wolff said.
Dr. Junda Woo, medical director of the Metropolitan Health District, said the city is at a fragile point as numbers slowly improve and Spring Break nears.
“We are in a race against time. We are in a race against the variants to get everybody vaccinated before those
variants (become) the most common strain in the whole country,” she said. “It's hard when there are conflicting messages coming from different levels of government. People are going to hear the message they want to hear.”
Businesses still can impose their own safety standards for employees and customers. Several San Antonio-area school districts said they were not changing their safety protocols until they get guidance from the Texas Education Agency. The TEA said it would provide it this week.
The message for parents, students and staff at East Central Independent School District was, “mask up tomorrow,” said its spokesman Brandon Oliver.
San Antonio-based H-E-B will encourage, but not require, its customers to wear masks, spokeswoman Dya Campos said in a statement Tuesday. But the retailer will continue requiring employees and vendors to wear masks while at work, she said.
“Lifting the mask requirement hurts the businesses because (currently) the businesses can fall back on, ‘Well, it's a law, we have to enforce it,' ” said Cherise Rohrallegrini, an infectious disease epidemiologist who served on the city-county COVID-19 health transition team. “They're going to have a hard time telling people to wear masks, and they're going to put their staff at risk.”
The announcement comes as Abbott is under new scrutiny from statewide power outages last month, which contributed to dozens of deaths and left millions of Texans without power or water for days. Local officials are still waiting to see whether the blackouts, which forced many households to shelter with friends and family, could lead to new coronavirus outbreaks.
The move also follows the easing of restrictions in several other states, with vaccine doses becoming more widely available. Nearly 20 percent of the nation's adults have received at least one shot, and 10 percent have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Texas, more than 3.5 million people have received at least one dose, and nearly 2 million have been fully vaccinated, out of a population of 29 million. The state ranks among the lowest for the percentage of people vaccinated, at 13 percent. Hospitalizations from the disease have meanwhile fallen by more than half from their high over 14,000 in January.
Republican state leaders welcomed the rollback, including House Speaker Dade Phelan, Rbeaumont, who called it “an important step in the reopening of Texas, improving the mental health of our students, increasing the reporting of domestic violence and child abuse, and revitalizing our business climate.”
Faster vaccine shipments
Over the weekend, Johnson & Johnson shipped out nearly 4 million doses of its newly authorized, one-shot COVID-19 vaccine to be delivered to states including Texas for use starting Tuesday. The company will deliver about 16 million more doses by the end of March and a total of 100 million by the end of June.
That adds to the supply being distributed by Pfizer and Moderna and should help the nation amass enough doses by midsummer to vaccinate all adults.
But the efforts come with strong warnings from health officials against reopening too quickly, as worrisome coronavirus variants spread. Young adults, who have been major drivers in past outbreaks, are not expected to be eligible for the vaccine for months, and many Texas teachers who have been ordered to return to the classroom also are not currently eligible.
Earlier this week, Houston was the first city to record every major
variant of the novel coronavirus — many of which are more contagious than the original strain.
On Monday, the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned state officials and ordinary Americans not to let down their guard, saying she is “really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures that we have recommended.”
“I remain deeply concerned about a potential shift in the trajectory of the pandemic,” she said. “We stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground that we have gained.”
Frustrated Democrats accused the governor of risking lives for political points with conservatives, some of whom have been critical of his previous emergency orders. More than 43,000 coronavirus deaths have been recorded in Texas.
“It's reckless and dangerous for Governor Abbott to intentionally undermine public safety because he thinks it's good politics,” U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-san Antonio, said in a statement. “Clearly this announcement is a desperate distraction from the governor's dereliction of duty during the massive power and water outages, for which he has never accepted personal responsibility.”
Infections spiked last summer after Abbott ended an initial statewide lockdown, and they exploded again last fall after he allowed restaurants and bars to open at increased capacity.
After the governor last year refused to allow local authorities to require residents to wear masks outside of their homes, Wolff outflanked Abbott with a June order that businesses require customers and employees to wear masks on their premises. Other major Texas cities soon followed.
Abbott said he had intended for cities and counties to do that all along, but eventually made wearing masks part of his own modified statewide order. Wolff said Abbott's new order appears to effectively block local governments from mandating masks.
Only Texans who are health care workers, 65 or older or have chronic conditions are eligible for the vaccine. If Abbott wants businesses to reopen, he should prioritize additional vaccines for people working at schools, restaurants and grocery stores — their risk of exposure to COVID-19 will grow even higher if people don't wear masks, Rohr-allegrini said.
There's nothing in the governor's order that prohibits wearing masks, and people should keep doing it — if they stop, “then it's possible we could see an earlier acceleration of new cases here in San Antonio,” said University Health's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Bryan Alsip.
The overall pandemic numbers are going down, but “for those units in the hospital that have COVID-19 patients — they are still busy,” he said. “The workload for our providers and staff caring for those patients hasn't changed.”
The Jewish Community Center, which keeps its pool and fitness facilities open by appointment only, won't drop its mask requirement, and “we'll take your temperature and ask you if you're feeling well, just like before,” said Saul Levenshus, its president and CEO.
“Everyone would like to say, ‘Whew, we're done with this.' But we are not, and we don't feel that we can represent our community responsibly if we can't keep them safe and healthy,” he said, adding that if he could speak to Abbott, his message would be, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Staff writers Bruce Selcraig, Danya Perez, Andres Picon, Madison Iszler Lisa Gray and Robert Downen contributed to this report, which contains material from the Associated Press.