So this entire unmasking of Texas (and the poor folks in Mississippi) is just a surreal.
Businesses, large and small are forced to make very difficult choices.
Don't even get me started on the chaos and havoc it is causing schools. I am going to actually put something on the prayer page here because it is really a horrible situation right now. There will be districts going mask-less and only today (because of Biden's speech yesterday) is the entire state allowing for all educators to get vaccinated. My daughter lives in one of the few countries that prioritized educator vaccinations beginning last week. If a teacher is in a district that goes to and unmasked policy next week, most teachers will not have had even one dose of vaccination yet and be exposed to 20-600 kids each week, depending on what they teach. My daughter would be exposed to 500 different students in an enclosed classroom each week. She is not hopeful her district will keep the mask policy in place because of the parents who insist on their child's right to be taught without one.
The vitriol is unbeliivable.
At some point @unk-p wrote that the country may have to secede from Texas. I think it's going to be that Texas voters will "secede" from their state government by voting them out. It's going to take a lot of postcard writing to get them out, but it is going to happen.
from your lips to Goddess's ears! The last time Texas had a good Governor was 30 years ago. Ann Richards. She was fantastic, and so funny. And how did the people of Texas reward her? By giving her one term only, and replacing her with, of all creatures, G.W. Bush. Gah! That was the day i bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco- with the intention of never coming back, not even to visit.
I hope someone sues Gov. Abbott in Texas - actually I hope a LOT of lawsuits come his way. Seems like there will be more than enough reasons. There are so many people who have already suffered that I'm just surprised we haven't heard about a ton of lawsuits already.
@triciact and just like clockwork, Abbutt is now blaming immigrants for spreading Covid45. He is doing and saying such horrible things, i can only think that he is hoping to be the Repug nominee for President in '24.
The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation just came out with an updated projection for the pandemic.
Good news: The latest estimate shows this thing beaten back pretty well by mid-summer. They are projecting about 6000 new infections per day in the US on July 1. For comparison, the last time the infection rate (estimated) was this low was the end of February, 2020.
So if people will just behave themselves-- keep wearing masks, get vaccinated ASAP, and continue to reduce their mobility-- we may soon be out of the woods. (cross your fingers, pray, send positive energy, whatever works !! ? )
For anyone who can get The New Yorker, here is a thorough analysis of how the Covid variants will affect the pandemic here in the U.S: https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/what-the-coronavirus-variants-mean-for-the-end-of-the-pandemic
Meanwhile in Texas...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened Wednesday to sue the city of Austin and surrounding Travis County after officials there, citing the continued threat of Covid-19, said they would continue to require residents to wear masks even “when outside of their residence.”
Paxton’s threat came on the same day the state’s mask mandate, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did away with last week, officially expired.
“City/county leaders must not be thinking clearly,” Paxton said in a Tweet. “Maybe it’s oxygen deprivation from quintuple-masking. Whatever the case, they’ve tried this before. They lost. Travis County and Austin have a few hours to comply with state law or I’ll sue them.”
Paxton, who like Abbott is a Republican, directed the threat at Travis County Judge Andy Brown, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, and cc’d Dr. Mark Escott of the Austin-Travis County Health Authority. They were given until Wednesday night to comply.
Adler responded to the threatened lawsuit by saying he and Brown will continue enforcing the safety mandates. "We will fight Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton’s assault against doctors and data for as long as we possibly can," Adler told the Austin American Statesman in a statement on Wednesday.
A year ago on March 11th, WHO declared Covid 19 a global pandemic.
WOW. I remember thinking it took an eternity for them to label it as so. I commented on their lack of calling in a global pandemic for days and days on this site.
How many here foresaw how changed this world would become?
Not me.
We pulled our kids out until after Spring Break today. Over the last week I've received a SLEW of texts from the school with "A student (once it was a staff member) has tested positive for COVID 19 at your child's school. There were no close contacts." Not only do the sheer number of these texts indicate that maybe, just maybe, there were in fact some close contacts, but in doing the math they lost 5% of their school population from Thursday to Sunday evening when the last text came in. The last time I received a text was back in January.
It's no secret I've been critical of the district's handling of COVID but in the past month they've mirrored the "Former Guy's" response - it's out of control, doing something about it will be hard, so let's not and say we did. The staff is vaccinated which is helpful but for the first time since the pandemic began it's now running rampant in the kids in our community and it just feels negligent when there are steps that can be taken. I'm mad today.
Today our county made news by becoming the 8th worst county in the nation ranked for COVID-19 spread with the NYT dataset in their "Places hit hard" map. Michigan is third worst right now.
#Libberdy. #Freedumb.
With one day of school left we just received a text that our district would go virtual tomorrow. This is at least a week too late. The communications stressed that school WILL resume on April 5th. I know a ton of people headed down to Florida, so my overall prediction (not intuition, just reasonable assessment of the available data) is that we'll be off that NYT list next week (because everyone is gone) and schools will say "See? Crisis averted!" and bring kids back. And the week of the 11th the texts and phone calls (all of which end with "There were no close contacts" will rocket out of control.
My wife and I are discussing the logistics of homeschooling the twins for the rest of the school year. She's finally come around to how badly our district is handling this. Literally every school district in the surrounding counties is handling this better. A parent friend of mine in the same district got a call yesterday to have her daughter quarantine until tomorrow (this was before they canceled) because of an exposure she had early last week. That was a 9 day turn around time for contact tracing. I checked with neighboring districts. A very large one and the second largest one in the state are averaging 24 hour turn around, with rare exceptions being no more than 48 hours. My district has just buried their head in the sand.
So while I am still enjoying the whispers of the awakening land around me, I'm preparing to double up my hunkering down. We're going to my moms for a few days (just an hour away - all of us vaccinated and staying in her house 99% of the time - we just want to SEE her.) and will come back home and -- homecation for a little while.
All this while the Michigan Legislature continues to introduce bills designed to open us up completely and strip the governor of her emergency powers: https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/2020-michigan-election-results-voting-polls-proposals-vote