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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here are two stories about Texas in the news right now that should be of interest in every state. One is that Houston has become the first US city to find every COVID variant present in the local population. That was in the Houston Chronicle on Monday. We'll talk to the Chronicles health and politics reporter Jeremy Blackman in just a minute. They have every COVID variant that doctors know about. The other story is that the very next day, Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott announced that he is lifting all COVID-related restrictions on businesses and individuals.

Governor Greg Abbott: It is now time to open Texas 100%.

Brian: So no more mask mandate and everything can reopen at 100% capacity. So how do these fit together? This finding every variant in Houston and reopening the state, and what are the implications for the rest of the country? On the Houston story, the article quote scientist at Houston Methodist Hospital saying they have identified 28 different variants now circulating in the city, including the UK, the Brazil, and I know you're going to cringe what is starting to be called the New York City variant.

Yesterday, according to the New York Times state-by-state COVID tracker, 274 Texans died from COVID, a 16% increase compared to two weeks ago, but in his Tuesday announcement, Governor Abbott said this.

Governor Abbott: COVID has not like suddenly disappeared. COVID still exists in Texas, and the United States, and across the globe, but it is clear from the recoveries, from the vaccinations, from the reduced hospitalizations, and from the safe practices that Texans are using, that state mandates are no longer needed.

Brian: Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday. Now that full lifting of limits takes effect next week, next Wednesday, and it's not just Texas, by the way. Also, on Tuesday, Mississippi's governor announced the same total lifting of capacity limits. In Massachusetts, a liberal state with a Republican governor Charlie Baker, all capacity limits on restaurants are about to come off. Now on MSNBC this Morning Joe this morning, here's how Dr. Fauci responded when asked about what Texas is about to do.

Dr. Fauci: My strong advice to them, Joe would be to actually continue to implement the public health measures. Now is not the time to pull back. The good news is that we have vaccines coming online. You saw the curve of the infections per day coming down, but over the last seven days or so, we've reached a bit of a plateau with the deflection of the curve isn't going straight down the way it was. That's a bad sign. We've seen that before. We've seen that last summer when we were trying to so-called open up the economy and open up the country when we said there were certain guidelines that you should adhere to.

As you know there was variable adherence to those guidelines, and then we had that really big surge that we don't want to repeat now. We were going in the right direction, now's the time to keep the foot on the accelerator and not pull off.

Brian: Dr. Fauci this morning in his usual scientific but diplomatic way. President Biden yesterday was more blunt.

President Biden: The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything's fine, take off your mask. Forget it. It still matters.

Brian: When everyone from whether anyone from Washington, or Delaware, or Brooklyn likes it or not, a new social experiment is starting in parts of this country, full opening with the country still averaging around 2,000 deaths a day, yesterday it was 2,300 according to The Times. What will businesses and individuals do with no state mandates? Will we sorted ourselves into COVID conservative and COVID Daredevil pods, will these increase disparities in who gets COVID even more because Daredevil behavior among the better off will come back to haunt lower-income neighbors?

This new social experiment now begins. With me now, Houston Chronicle health and politics reporter, Jeremy Blackman. Jeremy, thanks so much for giving us some time today. Welcome to WNYC, and hello from New York.

Jeremy Blackman: Hello, it's great to be on. Thank you.

Brian: Can you tell us first about the Houston Methodist Hospital finding of every known variant, 28 of them in Houston?

Jeremy: Yes, this is some research that was announced earlier this week. Obviously, it's not good news, a huge city in Houston. We have all of these variants, I don't really know much. [chuckles] There's not much to say about it, to be honest.

Brian: They've all been sampled there.

Jeremy: Yes, this is really getting to the speed at which the virus can now spread in places like Houston, and that's what's most concerning, especially when you compare it to what the governor ordered a day later.

Brian: It may be true in every major city by now that every variant that we know of is present and circulating, but they did the work, I guess, at Houston Methodist to do account based on samples they had taken, and so the report comes from your city. The next day, Governor Abbott announced the lifting of all COVID restrictions. Why now?

Jeremy: Well, you heard the President talk about this being "Neanderthal thinking." It's really calculated thinking, our governor is extremely shrewd. You have to put this in context, we're coming out of three weeks ago, having the biggest power outage crisis in our state's history. Dozens of people died, millions were left without power.

A week before that, the whole conversation was around a conservative legislative session. The governor was really controlling the rhetoric at that point, and people weren't talking so much about the COVID pandemic. I think you've seen the governor really lose control of the narrative here in Texas, and he needed something to steer that back in his direction. I think you saw that happen.

Brian: I've been seeing some local Texas officials, mayors of different cities, things like that, criticizing the governor on TV. Does his order mean that the local governments like Houston or Austin or wherever may not impose any limits locally? Or will there now be a patchwork of local rules based on local official's decisions?

Jeremy: No, that's right, they won't have really any control anymore. There is a provision in the order taking effect next Wednesday that if our percent of hospitalizations for people with COVID-19 goes above 15% for a week or longer, that those local officials can impose some very limited restrictions, but they can't really penalize anyone if they don't wear face masks. It really doesn't have much teeth.

That's really been the way that this pandemic response has worked out since last March, there really hasn't been much authority from local officials. I'm based here in Austin, and our local health entity issues guidance where we have levels where we're at, and most of those are for people to use and to understand where we're at in our outbreak, but it's there's no authority behind it.

Brian: It's the state making these decisions. What was that metric you gave? Because I think that would be important and interesting, because all kinds of places are trying to always figure out, "Well, what metric is really the best one to use to determine how much to open things and how much to close things," like we were going by case positivity rate in New York for a long time, and then Governor Cuomo said, "Well, case positivity rate is too general, and it really depends on how many people are voluntarily getting tested, so it's not the most accurate measure." So they started looking at other things. What was that metric you were giving us 15%?

Jeremy: It's a pretty unique metric. I'm not sure other states would necessarily want to use it. The metric is basically, we have the state broken up into regions. In each of those regions, if you take the number of hospitalized people, and then you take the number of people who are hospitalized with known COVID cases infections, and if the percentage of those COVID patients is over 15% for seven consecutive days, then that region needs to take some or going forward, it will be able to take some limited restrictions in place.

That has been in place since October that there has been a rollback restaurants need to reduce their capacity, bars can't be open, that kind of thing. It's not, I would say, completely welcomed in the public health community because by the time you have 15% or more of your hospitalized patients having COVID you normally have a pretty large outbreak and there is a lot of community spread. I think there's been some pushback around just the fact that the hospitalizations aren't a great metric to use because it's really catching the infection rate at the tail end when people are actually sick.

Brian: Listeners, we're opening the phones now on Texas removing all COVID capacity limits and mask mandates, but also the ways that layers of limits are coming off elsewhere. Do we have anyone listening in Texas right now? We got a call from Fort Worth yesterday. Any other Texans or listeners with ties to Texas out there at the moment and want to weigh in? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

I'm especially interested to hear not just your opinion of governor Abbott's reopening gamble, but how you will manage the new reality as an individual or a business owner? Business owners in Texas, will you voluntarily keep physical distancing rules? Leave it up to your customers? Or whatever else you would like to describe. 646-435-7280. If anyone relevant to those kinds of decisions happens to be listening. What about offices that don't have customers, but have many employees?

Are you insured for the choices that you make if they result in people getting sick or even dying because you went too far, too fast? Restaurant owners in Massachusetts, same questions for you with 100% restaurant capacity going to be allowed later this month, or for anything that you want to say or ask about this. Anyone, 646-435-7280, with Jeremy Blackman health and politics reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

Jeremy let's take an example. Last night, my Brooklyn Nets played your Houston Rockets at the Toyota Center down there, bringing our new star James harden back to where he used to be. He got roundly booed as expected, but do you know how many fans were in the seats to do that booing? What's the current capacity of Toyota Center with the COVID limits that are still in effect? Any idea?

Jeremy: Oh, gosh. I do not know the answer to that.

Brian: Well, what will they do? More and more to the point, what will they do when the state mandates come off next week? 18,000 fans, which is capacity nose to nose.

Jeremy: Well, I don't know the specific answer to that question, but I think it does get to the broader point which is that businesses have really relied and fallen back on this mandate, this mask mandate that's been in place since last summer to steer the steer of the response to the pandemic and ensure the safety for their employees, especially. This really removes all of that. This crutch that was a lot of retailers were able to use.

The big example here in Texas is our largest grocery chain and HEB announced yesterday that it was no longer requiring masks, but it was going to be strongly encouraging them. That scares a lot of their employees, but the reason the HEB really gave for that was because they don't want to endanger their employees from these really heated confrontations with customers who are vehemently opposed to wearing masks. It's really taken off that person that you could put the blame on, and the governor has taken that responsibility away from himself and placed it onto a lot of these retail businesses and restaurant owners.

Brian: They are going to have to start sighting business by business, institution by institution, what is their voluntarily imposed, locally imposed limit going to be? A million different decisions are going to be caused by this maybe millions.

Jeremy: Right. Even when you make those decisions then what do you do when somebody breaks it? Do you confront them? We're going to have I'm sure a lot of visible outbursts that start happening across the state. I will be interested to see what happens to our infection rate in the next couple of weeks. Talking to public health experts, I think there's a bit less of a concern. I don't want to say there's no concern, but there is.

It's a bit more muted than from maybe what you see on Twitter. Only because it's slightly premature. Our numbers have been decreasing significantly since January, the hospitalizations are down several thousand and we're going in the right direction. I think what would have been preferred was that we reach a plateau where we stabilize our number of new daily infections. Then, start maybe slowly easing off these restrictions, but that's not what happened.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with Jeremy Blackman from the Houston Chronicle on Texas reopening and the implications for us all. Got a lot of callers lined up and a lot of places to go with this yet, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer WNYC, as we talk about Texas lifting all capacity restrictions on all businesses, and the implications for us all, 646-435-7280, with Jeremy Blackman health and politics reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Heather in El Paso. You're on WNYC. Hi, Heather. Thanks for calling in.

Heather: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I just wanted to say I'm a former Brooklynite, but I just wanted to say that much like the governor is in charge of what all the rest of the cities can do, and then we can pick and choose, the Texas Education Agency is in charge of what the schools are allowed to do. For example, our local school district announced, right after the governor's announcement, that they'll continue to require masks as long as the TEA allows them to. Right now, the kids are remote because they got a waiver from TEA, but once that ends, we don't know what's going to happen with schools and all the teachers are not activated yet. That's one of my concerns about--

Brian: Thank you very much, Heather. I'm going to move on to Brian in Dallas. Brian, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in,

Brian: Hi, Brian. I use to be Brian from Hell's Kitchen, but now I'm Brian from Dallas, at least temporarily. I am really struck by, as an outsider here, I'm struck by the cultural difference that I thought was political as an outsider, Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative, but it's not really. There's this Texas swagger, there's this, "You can't push us around. Everything's bigger here. We're going to drive the biggest truck in the world, no matter what's happening.

The fossil fuel industry attitude that is true liberal [unintelligible 00:17:27] that I've met. I'm not at all surprised by the governor's decision. I think probably in liberal places like Houston and others that response will be different, but broadly, I think Texans are going to be thrilled to get back to their normal lives and not letting this virus tell them what to do. It's really strange coming from New York where, when I was there, the attitude was exactly the opposite. We're going to do whatever we have to do to beat this virus. Here they just want to ignore it.

Brian: Brian, thank you very much for your call. Jeremy Blackman from the Houston Chronicle, what are the politics of full reopening in Texas? Are there certain identifiable groups for it and against it, and the governor is trying to cater to his base? Or how would you break that down for us?

Jeremy: I think it's important to look at the evolution of governor Abbott's response. Early on, I would say he really tried to strike a pretty politically balanced response. He issued a lockdown early. Against a lot of the wishes in his conservative base, he did issue this mask mandate in the summer, which we came to learn did not have a lot of enforcement teeth behind it.

It nevertheless was at least a symbolically important move that he knew would be politically fraught, but as we moved more into the fall and you saw the campaign season heat up and then ever since the elections, the governor has taken a much more conservative approach and the language that he used to talk uses to talk about the pandemic and the response is rooted in reaching out to that core base that he needs. It's also just, I think, significant to recognize that he made this announcement in Lubbock, speaking at a chamber of commerce meeting. He goes to Lubbock whenever he wants to make an announcement that he doesn't want any questions about.

The press pool here in Austin doesn't follow him there. He knows that. The other thing too, to also note is just that there's a lot of talk about governor Abbott running for the presidency in four years. You've really started to see that heat up in the language that he uses to talk about the Biden administration. Yesterday, he was on Twitter and on local television stations, already setting up this dichotomy where any new out infection outbreaks from the coronavirus must be tied to the Biden administration allowing Mexican immigrants to come in with who are infected with the coronavirus.

Brian: Did he react to Biden calling this reopening a Neanderthal decision as Biden did yesterday?

Jeremy: That was his reaction.

Brian: Was to talk about immigration?

Jeremy: Talk about immigration, yes. I think there was some loose ties. It wasn't really clear what he was talking about-- There were citing specifically, but he was saying there are all of these immigrants who have been released while they're waiting asylum hearings by the Biden administration who have tested positive. I think there maybe have been about 100 in between January and March, who tested positive, who were released under such circumstances. He's setting up this contrast between himself and Biden, and really trying to talk presidentially.

Brian: There's one of the implications for us all, where it leaves the borders of Texas. If Abbott is trying to set himself up as a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 by being a leader in opening up his state back to a 100% capacity, then he's appealing to a Republican primary base. What about leaders in the groups hardest hit by the virus? We know it's lower-income black and Latino Americans, more than anyone else, they tend to be Democrats. Is this a political move that's likely to increase the disparities for the sake of wealthier, whiter people living more open lives, who will be happy with the governor for that?

Jeremy: Well, I think those disparities have been on pretty stark display throughout the pandemic. I'm not sure how they will play out in the next month in terms of outcomes and increasing those disparities. I know there have been a lot of efforts in places like Houston and San Antonio and Dallas to increase the equitable distribution of vaccines. We just got several million Johnson & Johnson vaccines. You had your caller talk about schools and there are a lot of teachers who were not prioritized early on in getting vaccinated, who are now being vaccinated today, and that is new.

I do think there's hope that we can prevent against those disparities growing even more, but definitely, we're in a risky place right now with an uncertain path forward for the next at least several weeks.

Brian: Keith in the Bronx. You're on WNYC with Jeremy Blackman from the Eastern Chronicle. Hi, Keith.

Keith: How you doing? Good morning, Brian and your guests. My concern is that Texas is getting ready to host the National College Championship there along with the NIT. Those athletes are coming across the country to go into Texas. Will the precautions be put in effect so then when they return back home they don't spread anything back to us here in New York and across the country?

Brian: That's a great question. Another potential implication for us all, Jeremy, I don't know if you've reported on that particular conference. If people are coming from every state having to do with, I guess, they say high school sports, then there's the possibility of if they're not practicing the physical distancing that other States are practicing anymore, bringing stuff back home.

Jeremy: Absolutely. I think they're still trying to figure out all of the attendance restrictions in place for that tournament. I imagine there will be some reduced capacity attendance. I did look up while we were talking the attendance for the Spurs. I haven't seen one for the Toyota Center, but for the Spurs, they are going to start allowing fans back in, I think, about 3,200 fans per game. That's a reduced capacity attendance, but it'a question--

Brian: I'm curious about this because the big arenas, that's one of the questions. If the governor is lifting all capacity restrictions. During the break, I looked it up for the Houston rockets home arena, the Toyota Center, and they've been going at 25% capacity. They've been allowing 4,500 people in out of the 18,000 capacity. Under the governor's new order, they're allowed to allow in 18,000 people. Are you saying the San Antonio Spurs have already announced after the governor's announcement that they will voluntarily keep that pretty low attendance limit that they've had in place?

Jeremy: I'm saying they've had a lower attendance rate than the rockets and they're going to start lifting that up. I don't know if that is correlated with the governor's announcement, but it sounds like they had planned to do that March 12th.

Brian: I guess we don't know if they're going to lift it all at once to 100%.

Jeremy: Well, the basketball arenas definitely are a question. We are a huge sports state, a huge college sports state. It's important to look back and just-- we've allowed attendance at football games for months. If you look at Lubbock and Texas tech up there, their big outbreak in the winter and December and January really was tied to the college sports. You just saw a huge, huge number thousands and thousands of people coming together for tailgating at events and when you talk to public health officials from there, they really were worried about that and how it had led to big outbreaks.

Brian: Here's Clarence in Jackson, Mississippi. Mississippi announced a 100% reopening right after governor Abbott in Texas did on Tuesday. Hi, Clarence, thanks so much for calling in. Hello, from New York.

Clarence: Yes, absolutely. Just wanted to say I listen to your program almost every day, from Massachusetts originally, but I was born in Staten Island, New York.

Brian: Glad you're still with us. I know you're having major water problems in Jackson still after the storm, right?

Clarence: Absolutely. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I have real low water pressure here because they're afraid to increase the water pressure because all it does is it exacerbates the peanut brittle piping system that we have. What I want to say is this, I think, it's economic here in Mississippi, for every $1 that we send the federal government, we get back $7.5 dollars. It's basically the too welfare state. Though a lot of places didn't close down and then you do have the mask and no mask folks here, that they need to increase spending because people aren't spending money.

This is totally a consumer-based economy. You have to spend money in order for the state to collect revenues. I think it's an economic issue. As your guest suggested that this is going to be an experiment because we will have controls throughout the country, so we'll see what happens. If there's any change, I'll call and let you know.

Brian: Please do. Are you seeing yet? Is it too early to see, Clarence, if businesses are starting to make individual decisions now that the governor there announced on Tuesday that they can open at a 100% capacity or are some businesses saying, "No, we're still not doing this. We don't consider it individually safe," or if they're generally going to go full tilt?

Clarence: No. Not yet. We're not going to. Maybe this afternoon, we'll see some reactions, but so far, I have not seen or heard any reactions on the news or in the papers. We're going to give that a couple of days to affirm it. All things considered, Jackson is the blue dot in Mississippi, but unfortunately, during this whole thing, there's been squabbles between the governor and the mayor, Lumumba. We have to see how that shakes out. One bright spot though, we have a progressive Republican Lieutenant governor here and so I hope that he decides to run for the governorship in the next couple of years because he seems to be progressive on all fronts and we do appreciate him.

Brian: Clarence, thanks. Stay in touch. This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. Just a couple of minutes left with Jeremy Blackman from the Houston Chronicle, as we talk about the implications of Texas and as we just heard Mississippi lifting all capacity restrictions related to COVID on all businesses. Here's a political question, Jeremy that came in for you on Twitter. Listen to David writes, "Is Governor Abbott doing this as a deflection, handling of the storm crisis was horrible, making a move like this is popular among citizens, total shift of focus buries the storm screw-ups." True?

Jeremy: [chuckles] It's at least a coincidence, the timing. If you think about it, in Texas, our legislature meets every other year, this is a year where they are meeting. They've been meeting since February, the things on the legislative agenda list, and all our state government is controlled by Republicans at this point. The priorities on the legislative agenda were things like punishing cities that defund the police, mandating the star-spangled banner ad at football games and basketball games.

There were no really COVID-related responses that were a priority. It was a very red meat conservative-led agenda. Then you had this huge storm that came out of [unintelligible 00:31:22] field and really angered a lot of Texans, including people who are Republicans who lost power for several days and maybe had to make some really tough life choices. I had to go and live with people in a house that had heat, but I was concerned and exposed to potential Coronavirus infection.

There has been a lot of hurt and anger around the power outages. I think if nothing else was an opportunity to recenter the conversation around things that are going right, things that our state leaders are doing to push our economy forward, and that has definitely been one of the impacts.

Brian: Let me get one or two more calls in here real quick. Xavier, in Dallas, you're on WNYC. Hi, Xavier, thanks so much for calling in today.

Xavier: Thank you. Thank you for the time. Yes, I want to talk about the two things. Mask mandate and also the winter storm that hit us. Well, just to stay in the topic of the COVID-19, for us, for my family here in Dallas, one of us works at home, one is studying, and also at home, one of them works in the restaurant industry and the other one works in the hotel industry. For the governor to go out and open up the state of Texas having no-- The mandate on masks and leaving it once again down to individual counties and individual restaurants to make their own rules, it's not surprising, but at the same time, it's almost like a gamble that people have to make.

Not too long ago, my entire family got infected by COVID-19, of course, it took us a while to get back and resources are not readily available compared to other places. Even then it was just a difficult time to maneuver, and then for the governor to decide to do that-- I understand the business aspect, but at the same time, he understands the people, there's people who don't have the means to just go out and wear a mask because even then I can walk outside.

Even with the mandate in place, people were not even wearing masks, is not if they were, it was just on their mouth and not covering the nose. It sounds like brush off that people aren't really paying attention, and then there's the other half that do. Imagine now going to the grocery store here at my local Kroger, I'm not going to see people wearing masks, even though the store might have a rule, but they might not enforce it because that's a lot of people there to control.

Brian: Right. You said to us that your family works in the service industry? Is it too early for you to see whether businesses who you or your family members are affiliated with lifting their restrictions in ways that won't protect the workers as well?

Xavier: The state has been doing incrementals from 25% to 50%, now 100%. I guess it all goes down to how the person wants to continue working because at the same time it's almost the state is pushing people to work, so they can get off on the tech its Texas unemployment benefits checks.

I can see the incentive to try and open 100% and push people away because even then at the hotel, one of my family members was furloughed, and was taken away from the full-time status and brought down to part-time. I guess bringing this back, it's almost like pushing people to go back to work or go back to these events and go on eat to try re-stabilize the economy, but at the same time, I feel like you're also putting-- There's going to be a collateral against how many people are going to get reinfected, if not infected, they haven't done so.

Brian: Are you against this, or are you conflicted, given the jobs that you in some of your family members could go back to?

Xavier: For me, I'm kind of conflicted, but at the same time, I think it's too soon and considering the fact that the whole state is going to open up and just let the situation handle and then considering the fact that Ellie's in Dallas now easier to judge [unintelligible 00:36:03] Jenkins has obviously done a fairly good job in trying to control how to maintain the COVID crisis while trying to navigate any review from the state down in Austin. I guess I can see it, but I'm not really-- I guess I'm against the opening up 100% because I don't think it's right. Between the fact that we don't know--

Brian: Right, if it's going to be safe. Thank you so much for checking in with us. We really, really appreciate it, call us again. Last question, building out of his question, Jeremy, is there an immunity from lawsuits provision that goes with this 100% reopening? We know that's one of the big things that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader wanted at the national level if businesses now are going to get to make their own choices about how much density they're going to allow while COVID is still raging? Are they going to be sueable or is there also something that holds them harmless?

Jeremy: It's a great question. It's undecided. The legislature is currently taking up that issue and it's one of their priorities passing immunity for businesses that have seen these outbreaks. It's not in place right now, it could be in the next couple of months.

Brian: Well, it's a big social experiment. 274 people died in Texas yesterday from COVID. It's a life-and-death social experiment. We will see what happens in the coming weeks once Texas fully reopens. This takes effect on Wednesday. Jeremy Blackman, health and politics reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Thanks so much for spending this time with us. I know you're busy down there. We really appreciate it.

Jeremy: I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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