Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he is reopening the state on May 1. The state’s stay-at-home order will end on April 30.
Governor Abbott will allow commercial establishments such as malls, restaurants, movie theaters, museums, and retail stores to resume operations. However, they can accommodate only less than 25 percent of their capacity.
Texas is reopening on a staged phasing. Governor Abbott will roll out this strategy every few weeks. He said he would use the data on positive COVID-19 cases, hospital capacity, hospitalizations, deaths, and hot spots to assess whether more businesses can open.
Moreover, Abbott said he plans to reopen hair salons, barber shops, bars, and gyms. He intends to increase the capacity to 50 percent by May 18.
He did not elaborate on the enforcement of the capacity rule. However, he reiterated that it is punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to 180 days in jail.
“Millions of Texans have sacrificed their livelihoods as well as so many of their cherished moments as an effort to protect the health and safety of our fellow Texans,” Abbott said.
“Every life lost is tragic, but the fact is the tragedies in Texas have been far fewer than most states," he added.
According to the governor, he took into account the opinions from the state’s top doctors involved in his so-called “strike force.” Meanwhile, 1.9 million Texans have already filed for unemployment.
Contact tracing
Moreover, the Texas reopening program comes with a modified strategy for contact tracing. This refers to the act of monitoring who a COVID-19 patient came into contact with.
Regarding the state's testing capacity, Abbott mentioned that private labs can test more than 25,000 per day by next month.
The state's testing and tracing capacity was “a very much intense work in progress right now,” Dr. Mark McClellan, director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and one of the governor’s medical advisors, told the Dallas Morning News on Sunday.
“You could argue that government responsibilities are to ensure adequacy of testing. And not just adequacy of testing but adequacy of support for public health to trace and monitor disease activity in the community, viral activity in the community,” said Dr. Mark Casanova, the head of the Dallas County Medical Society, after Abbott’s announcement. “We need to be monitoring for the earliest signs.”
COVID-19 cases in Texas
Texas has tested 290,517 people to date. Per capita, the state tested 952 people per 100,000 population. Data suggests this is fourth-worst in the nation, ahead of only Virginia (946), Kansas (900), and Arizona (890).
There are 25,297 coronavirus cases in Texas and 663 people have died. A total of 1,563 are currently in the hospital. The contact tracing effort expects another 1,000 tracers by April 27 and 4,000 by May 11. T
“It’s hard to get rid of this virus because it is so contagious, so we’re not just going to open up and hope for the best,” Abbott said. “Instead, we will put measures in place that keep businesses open while also containing the virus to keep Texans safe.”
“You need to have a statistically comfortable analysis, like ‘x’ number of individuals out of 100 or 1,000 is our comfort level. If we can achieve that and have the ability to readily test people who have been exposed directly or have any level of infection, then we can do this,” Casanova said.
“We did it right and got it right going into this and this was on the collective ‘us’ as the citizens of North Texas. If we can keep that in mind we have the potential to get it right on the back end.”
