In a brilliant effort to make Texans stop hating him over the power and water issues in the state, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is lifting all COVID-19 regulations for people, businesses, and schools effective next Wednesday, so they'll hate him for killing tens of thousands of Texans over the next couple of months instead.
"It is now time to open Texas 100%," said Gov. Greg Abbott this afternoon, signaling the ease of COVID-19 restrictions.
Effective next Wednesday, all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent and the mask mandate will be lifted, the governor stated as part of his executive order to rescind previous orders.
While Abbott acknowledged the virus isn't going away, he insisted the state is far better equipped to fight COVID-19 than a year ago thanks to vaccines.
Late last week, the Texas governor indicated an announcement is coming "pretty soon" on whether he'll relax current COVID-19 mandates, including one in effect since last July that requires masks in public.
"We're working right now on evaluating when we're gonna be able to remove all statewide orders, and we will be making announcements about that pretty soon," Abbott said during a news conference in Corpus Christi last Thursday.
Abbott's announcement took place inside a locally-owned Mexican restaurant in the Lubbock area.
Expect other GOP governors to do the same in the weeks ahead, even as Dr. Fauci and the CDC are warning that it's too soon to do what Abbott is trying to do.
"We don't want to continue to prevent people from doing what they want to do. But let's get down to a good level," Fauci said in an interview on "Face the Nation." "Let's get many, many more people vaccinated. And then you could pull back on those types of public health measures. But right now, as we're going down and plateauing, is not the time to declare victory because we're not victorious yet."
While there has been a drop in the number of new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations since early January, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warned Friday that the declines could be stalling at a high number, which she said was a "very concerning shift in the trajectory." As of Friday, the seven-day average is just under 73,000 new infections, according to the CDC.
While Fauci said the fall in coronavirus cases was "really sharp and encouraging," he agreed a plateau of around 70,000 new cases per day is "concerning."
"That's exactly the thing that happened during previous surges," he said. "As it peaked and started to come down, people withdrew some of the intensity of the public health measures and it kind of stabilized at a very high level. That's very dangerous."
Fauci stressed Americans should continue to comply with public health measures such as wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings and social distancing. He said the leveling off in new cases also underscores the need to vaccinate as many people "as quickly and as expeditiously as you possibly can."
"That's why adding yet again another really good vaccine into the mix is really very important," he said.
So expect to see another spike in COVID cases in March and hospitalizations and deaths in April. Hopefully Texas won't suffer too badly in the meantime, but I'm betting with zero mask and social distancing mandates, the spike will be rapid and devastating and very obvious to officials by April 1.
Sorry, Texas friends. Your 2021 is only going to get worse.
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