Across the state of Texas, about 90 percent of beds in intensive care units are currently occupied, according to data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 50 hospitals have no ICU capacity at all, including hospitals near the border with Louisiana, which has been hit hard in the current wave of coronavirus infections. Austin has only a handful of ICU beds open; it has never seen as many ICU patients with covid-19 as it is seeing now.
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It’s a moment of crisis, prompting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to announce several steps aimed at reducing the strain on the state’s health-care system. The state will open infusion centers to help patients avoid the need to be hospitalized, for example, and will work with staffing agencies to bring health-care workers to the state to help with staffing shortages.
Those health-care workers who answer the state’s call will be putting themselves at risk in service to Abbott’s constituents — something Abbott seems less enthusiastic about doing.
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“The State of Texas is taking action to combat the recent rise in COVID-19 cases,” Abbott said in the statement, “and ensure that our hospitals and communities have the resources and support they need to mitigate the virus.”
What Texas has not done is take action to keep cases from rising dramatically in the first place. When Abbott rescinded the state’s mask-wearing recommendations in March, he faced criticism from public-health experts (and President Biden) who worried he was acting too soon. But cases kept falling. So Abbott went further, using the low level of cases this spring to announce that he was banning mask mandates by government entities. He also used concern about the virus to pivot attention to migration at the border, limiting the ability of migrants to travel in the state and citing spurious concern about the spread of the virus.
The emergence of the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus scrambled what seemed like a political layup. In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presentation obtained by The Washington Post last month, one slide addresses the need for masks specifically: “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant.”
Only about 44 percent of Texans are fully vaccinated, putting Texas in the bottom third of states. As a former medical adviser to Abbott — emphasis on former — told the Dallas Morning News, “there is evidence that wearing a mask, especially at times of high community transmission which Texas has right now, does help significantly.” So, with schools reopening across Texas, several large districts are simply ignoring Abbott’s prohibition on mask rules. Districts in Dallas, El Paso and Houston are imposing their own mandates.
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The springtime lull in cases spurred a number of governors (particularly ambitious ones) to lean into the anti-mandate rhetoric that was popular in conservative media. When cases began rising again, though, they were suddenly in a politically vulnerable position, having jettisoned a key tool for keeping coronavirus cases low.
It’s akin to where the Republican establishment found itself in late 2015 in regard to Donald Trump’s primary candidacy. Trump seemed like a nonstarter, so candidates and leaders humored his candidacy in hopes they might pick up the support of his fervent supporters. Things didn’t go as expected, however, and the chance to be sincerely critical of Trump had passed. So they dug in deeper.
There is certainly a robust part of the Republican base that sees rules governing the wearing of masks or mandates for vaccines as an unacceptable intrusion on their rights. It is also true that this sense has been stoked by conservative media, by officials eager to appeal to those Republicans and by the former president. Trump’s strength as a politician was always that he reflected the will of his base back to it (usually as framed by Fox News), leaving him in the awkward position of wanting credit for the vaccine but not wanting to anger his supporters by pushing them hard to get it.
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There’s nothing preventing Abbott from rescinding his ban on mask mandates except politics. He, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), has encouraged people to get vaccinated, but a June poll conducted by the Texas Tribune and the University of Texas found that 4 in 10 Republicans in the state won’t get a vaccine dose. Even if the unvaccinated got a dose tomorrow, the effects take some time to kick in. Mask-wearing lessens the spread of the virus immediately. But such a recommendation would have an acute short-term cost in the form of Fox News scolding — and a potential long-term cost for Abbott in a Republican primary. So instead of asking voters to wear masks, he asks out-of-state nurses to do so.
Again, this is not to say that Abbott’s opposition to mandates is entirely insincere. There is a clear strain of rhetoric about vaccinations in particular that holds that people can choose to put themselves in harm’s way if they wish. But this is a sort of bizarro form of personal responsibility akin less to making seat-belt-wearing optional than to making it optional to know how to drive before getting behind the wheel of a car. If you don’t wear a seat belt, you put yourself at risk. If you don’t know how to drive, you put others at risk — including those who are wearing their seat belts.
Those full ICU beds in Texas mean that actual car-accident victims are less likely to get immediate treatment. Those unmasked Texans make it more likely that the virus will spread among the unvaccinated, including those who can’t get a vaccine because they are too young or because their health is compromised.
But for Abbott the alternative is having Sean Hannity disparage him for three minutes, so it’s apparently not really much of a choice.