Absolutely Reskless?
Is it "Absolutely Reckless" for Texas to eliminate Covid Restrictions?
Yesterday Texas's governor signed an executive order ending nearly all Covid restrictions statewide including mask mandates. California’s governor Ol' Gavin Newsom called the move "Absolutely Reckless". When you look at the moves Texas is making, it's putting them in a similar level of openness to where Florida moved to back in September, over 5 month ago. As I’ve written before, Florida has seen better covid outcomes than California or Texas, so how could it be reckless to follow the lead of the large state that made it through the winter the best?
If you ask me, what's reckless is keeping children out of school for over a year. It's reckless to prevent millions of citizens from earning a living. It's "absolutely reckless" to extend temporary measures, meant to buy time until hospital capacity could be ramped up, into indefinite year long restrictions on society, the costs of which are only beginning to be borne out.
One can argue about whether these lockdowns in California, Texas, and elsewhere have had any effect, but that's at root beside the point. The stated purpose of lockdown was to prevent overflow of the hospitals, to "SLOW the spread". At some point last spring this goal was forgotten and replaced with a societal wide effort to rid the virus completely. That's clearly not possible.
Nowhere in the country today are hospital systems over-stressed, much less leaning on the non-existent overflow capacity we've had a year to build. The original stated reason for lockdowns does not currently exist in the US. For this reason I say good on you Texas, but about time...
And I wish I could say the same for CA, but as an El Dorado Country resident about to enter the "Red Tier", I guess I have to settle for 25% restaurant and 10% gym capacity...
Anyway 0 and 2...