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The great state of Texas

El Paso is doing all right with Delta

Sep 22nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Good for them, let’s hope it lasts.

While some other metro areas like Austin reported record high numbers of COVID-19 patients in their area hospitals just last month, and while statewide hospitalizations came close to eclipsing the January peak of 14,218, El Paso-area hospitals, which serve nearly a million West Texas residents, haven’t come close to their previous highs.

El Paso’s peak for COVID-19 hospitalizations was just over 1,100 in mid-November, said Wanda Helgesen, director of BorderRAC, the state’s regional advisory council for local hospitals.

On Thursday, the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in El Paso was 127.

In fact, the city’s daily hospitalization numbers haven’t broken 200 since March, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Hospitals are seeing an increase in patients, have occasionally seen their ICUs fill up and are having the same staffing problems as the rest of the state, she said, but have so far been able to handle the uptick.

Most of the pressure is related to non-COVID patients, many of whom had been waiting to get treatment for other problems, she said.

“We do have a surge of patients but not to the extent that other parts of Texas are having,” she said.

Helgesen and others say much of the credit can be attributed to the area’s high vaccination rate, widespread compliance with masking and social distancing, and a strong partnership among local community and health care leaders.

“It is amazing,” Helgesen said. “It is absolutely a credit to our community. I really think it was an all-out effort.”

The share of COVID-19 tests in El Paso that come back positive is hovering around 6%, while the statewide positivity rate is three times that at 18%.

And while COVID-19 patients, most of whom are unvaccinated, took up more than 30% of hospital capacity in some areas and more than 20% statewide last week, in El Paso they accounted for only 7% of patients in local hospitals.

For a city with one of the state’s highest per-capita COVID-19 death counts, the numbers present a rare glimmer of good news for the traumatized residents of this West Texas border city.

“Compared to the rest of Texas, we’re in heaven,” said Gabriel Ibarra-Mejia, assistant professor of public health at the University of Texas-El Paso. “That doesn’t mean we are free from COVID, but we’re doing much, much better than most of the rest of the state. The numbers don’t lie.”

Civic and health leaders say they aren’t ignoring one important fact: El Paso’s surges have been weeks behind the rest of the state throughout the pandemic, so it’s possible that the region’s own delta-fueled spike could still be ahead.

“We aren’t letting our guard down,” Helgesen said.

El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser, who lost his mother and brother to COVID during the winter surge, said the reason the city and county have enacted recent mask mandates, in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on them and in spite of lower numbers, is because the potential for another surge is still real.

“We do worry and we want to make sure that we don’t have any spikes,” he said. “You always want to be proactive and you always want to be prepared.”

The story goes on to recount the huge spike in COVID cases that El Paso experienced last November, which put it in the national news. If you look at the included chart of COVID cases, which tracks El Paso and the state as a whole, the two were mostly in sync except for that giant surge in November, which came between the two big statewide surges, and now, when the statewide rate began to take off in May but El Paso’s stayed more or less where it had been. I’m sure the mask mandate and above-norm vaccination rates have helped with that, but it may also be that enough unvaccinated El Pasoans have had COVID that the overall rate of immunity is high enough to be something like herd immunity. Or maybe they’re just lucky right now, and the curve will begin to turn upward for them eventually. I very much hope that’s not the case, but I think we all know that this pandemic has been persistent and somewhat random about who gets it the worst at a given time. In the meantime, though, keep on keeping on, El Paso.

COVID rate slows a bit, but ICUs still full

Sep 19th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
No comments yet

The good news.

So far, the delta variant has fueled a month of Houston-area COVID hospitalizations over 3,000, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

But Texas Medical Center records show positive case rates may be slowly declining. According to TMC’s daily report, 1,939 people tested positive Tuesday in the Greater Houston area, a decline that may be related to COVID testing site closures as a precaution before Hurricane Nicholas.

Also Tuesday, the medical center admitted 310 new COVID-19 patients compared to the average 328 per day last week. Hospitals in the TMC remain at 90 percent capacity.

Dr. Wesley Long, a microbiologist and medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist, has been tracking and analyzing the virus and its variants through the hospital’s COVID-19 genome sequencing operation.

While Long sees the increase slowing, he hesitates to say Houston is passed the peak of the surge.

“It’s like cresting the top of the wave, you don’t know what the backside of the wave is going to look like,” Long said. “In the beginning of this fourth wave, there were some people hopeful it would go up quickly and come down quickly. That’s not the case.”

The fourth wave’s peak has been broader than previous waves, which spiked and declined within about 25-30 days, Long explained. The big question with the delta wave is whether it will plateau at a high rate of hospitalizations or have a slow decline.

“It’s hard to know how other things like holidays and school will affect the case count,” he said. “It’s really important to keep masking, social distancing and staying home if you’re sick because it’s important to bring the fourth wave under control.”

Another way to look at it:

The not so good news.

COVID-19 hospitalizations have been declining across Texas and the Houston region, but the virus is still keeping a high number of people in ICUs, prolonging the strain on patients waiting for critical care beds.

Last week, the number of available adult ICU beds in Texas sunk below 300 for the first time in the pandemic, with 270 beds available on Sept. 8 and 279 available on Sept. 9, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. There were 326 beds available this Wednesday, including 65 in the nine-county region surrounding Houston, the data show.

Texas Medical Center ICUs for weeks have been hovering around 90 percent full with “Phase 2” surge plans — which add 373 ICU beds to the 1,330 available in Phase 1 — activated.

[…]

ICU data is a lagging indicator of the virus’s impact, [Dr. Syed Raza, vice president of medical operations at CHI St. Luke’s Health-The Woodlands Hospital] said, because the sickest patients need care for a longer period of time. He said it is the “natural course of the pandemic” for ICUs to remain high after hospitalizations decline.

Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, said the hospital strain appears to be easing overall. The number of COVID patients in ICU beds likely peaked at the end of August, when they took up 49 percent of all critical care beds, he said. As of Wednesday, that number dropped to 45 percent.

He said he is cautiously optimistic that “we’ll continue to see this trend move in right direction.” He compared the current ICU situation to flooding during hurricane.

“We are no longer stuffing towels under the door” to stop the water, he said. “But the water is still over our threshold.”

I mean, it could be worse. It’s still not good, and it’s going to continue to not be good for awhile, but it could be worse. Keep up with the precautions, they’re our best hope in the short term as more people get vaccinated.

The wrong track

Sep 18th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Interesting, but there are some key questions left unasked.

According to a poll conducted by Texas 2036, at least 92 percent of Texas voters said they were concerned about the future of the state, with 58 percent also stating they felt extremely concerned about it.

The Texas 2036 is a nonprofit organization that aims to build long-term, data-driven strategies to secure Texas’ prosperity. They recently commissioned a poll to longtime GOP pollster Mike Baselice’s firm, and who has worked with both Trump and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in the past.

The poll results, which were released on Tuesday, paint a grim picture of what Texans feel right now and their hopes for the future. It had 1,001 participants and was made 43% by cell phone, 23% by landline, and 34% through the web. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.1%.

The report shows that for the first time in the six years the question has been asked, more Texas voters (26%) said they feel financially worse off than they did the year before. Only 20 percent of the people being polled said they believe they are better off.

52 percent of voters said they believe that Texas is worse off than it was this time last year, a truly concerning fact considering last year the pandemic was at a considerable height and vaccines were not yet released. Only 13 percent said they thought the state was headed in a better direction.

The overwhelming majority of Texas voters agree with using federal COVID-19 relief money to fund large-scale projects and promote the state’s economy. This is something that state lawmakers can actually do in the upcoming third special session of the legislature.

The poll landing page is here, the press release for it is here, and all the data provided can be found here and here. It’s interesting and easy to read, so go check them out. The main thing that I came away thinking is “but who will the voters blame for their negative feelings?” I’ve noted the flip side of this question before, when I’ve asserted that the best hope for Democrats in general and Texas Democrats in particular is a strong performance by President Biden and a good economy to go with it. That works to a point, but only to the extent that the President gets the lion’s share of the credit for those good things. You can be sure Greg Abbott and his minions will do everything they can to grab that credit, and it will be up to the voters to decide who deserves it. The same is true for the blame – do you pin it on the Governor or the President? I can’t answer that question, and the pollsters don’t ask.

There are no electoral questions, and this is the first poll of its kind, so we don’t have any bases for comparison. One can certainly argue that this is a tricky spot for statewide Republican incumbents to be in, since they’re the closest ones to the situation and the ones that voters can take out their frustrations on in 2022. But again, they get to have a say in that, and they will do what they can to redirect and distract, as anyone in their position would. This is the kind of place where having a gubernatorial candidate would really help, since there would be a natural conduit for the message that the blame should apply to the guys in charge of the state. We don’t have that yet, so that task needs to be diffused outward for the time being. The point here is that this kind of data can be used by anyone, and so there needs to be a coherent message and a recognized messenger to get the viewpoint you like out into the discourse. For now at least, that’s on all of us. Robert Rivard has more.

Our COVID failures and our economy

Sep 14th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Remember when the goal was to get the economy going again?

The recent surge in COVID-19 cases is not only hitting the state in terms of lives lost, but it’s taking its toll on the Texas economy. That’s according to a new report from the Perryman Group, an economic research and analysis firm in Waco.

They estimate the state’s failure to contain the disease has led to nearly 72,000 job losses. The analysis also found on average, the state loses roughly $187,000 for every employee unable to return to work because of the pandemic. That amounts to total potential losses of about $13 billion per year, the firm found.

But they argue many of these potential losses are preventable.

“What we need to do right now is do everything we can to make it safer for people to return to work. That includes masks where appropriate. That includes safety in schools so people that have issues with their children in childcare and things like that that prevent people from returning to work,” said Ray Perryman, president and CEO of the Perryman Group. “These are what we call preventable [economic] losses.”

Perryman said certain industries are being hit harder than others.

“In terms of dollar impacts, obviously a worker in a tech industry per worker has a much bigger impact than say a worker in a restaurant. But from an industry perspective, the ones being hit the hardest are the ones you’ve been hearing about since the beginning of the pandemic that deal in interpersonal relationships – retail, particularly restaurants, salons, airlines,” he said.

He says getting more people vaccinated is also key to avoid future economic losses.

The full report is here if you want to read it, and there’s video of an interview with Perryman about this at the first link. Honestly, in the context of Texas’ economy, $13 billion is pretty small, as is 72,000 jobs. Not nothing, especially if you’re in one of the more affected sectors, but not so much that you’d notice it on a graph. The point that all of this was preventable, with more aggressive vaccination promotion and distribution, and a continued reliance on masks while allowing local governments to have the discretion they need to respond as they see fit, is still true. There’s no good reason why we have to be going through what we are going through now. It was all the result of Greg Abbott’s actions.

The final Ike Dike plan

Sep 13th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s taken a long time to get to this point.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has released the final version of its Coastal Texas Study, which examines a proposed coastal barrier to protect the Houston region against storm surge. The report’s completion marks a significant step for a concept that has taken years to develop. It began with the early imaginings of a Texas A&M professor, who designed a so-called “Ike Dike” to protect against devastating surge such as that seen on Bolivar Peninsula from Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Environmental advocates, regional planners and concerned residents are among those who have offered feedback on various project drafts. The details and big picture have been argued every which way. Now begins a years-long process before it can be built, leaving the region and the Houston Ship Channel still vulnerable to hurricanes as the design is sorted out and funding secured.

Here’s what you need to know now:

You can click over to read the report itself and the Chron summary. A few things have changed along the way, but the basics are still all there. The study also includes a final environmental impact statement, if you want to know more about that. The Army Corps of Engineers will sign off on the plan and send it on to Congress on or before October 12, at which point the question of funding this project, which has a $29 billion price tag, can begin in earnest. I have no idea at this point if Ike Dike funding will be part of the budget reconciliation process – I don’t think it was in the Senate’s infrastructure bill, but I could be wrong about that. I can’t wait to hear what excuse Ted Cruz will come up with to vote against this.

Going after the snitch sites

Sep 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I approve of this.

When an anti-abortion group last week created a “pro-life whistleblower” website encouraging people to anonymously report violations of Texas’ new six-week abortion ban, a group of politically active Texans noticed one potentially fatal flaw.

“They’re trying to use the internet to retaliate against people who were raised on the internet,” said Olivia Julianna, an 18-year-old student and activist from Sugar Land who is among the leadership of a group called “Gen Z For Change.” The group was formerly known as “TikTok for Biden.”

Olivia, who goes by only her first and middle names on social media due to safety concerns, said the goal was clear: “This website, if we can mess with them in any way, if we can stop even one woman from having a lawsuit filed against her or waste even a second of their time, we need to do it.”

The tip site was meant to help enforce Senate Bill 8, the Texas law that went into effect at the start of this month that prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant.

The law has so far avoided being blocked by the courts because the government does not enforce it. Instead, it puts enforcement in the hands of any private citizen who wishes to sue an abortion provider or others who “aid or abet” someone getting an illegal abortion, with a possible reward of at least $10,000 per successful suit.

Olivia was one of several young left-leaning activists who immediately took to social media to sabotage the site by flooding it with false reports and other information — some suggested anti-Gov. Greg Abbott sayings. Others recommended off-the-wall responses or nonsense.

She and other members of Gen Z For Change — Generation Z is typically defined as those who are now 18 to 24 — quickly got to work.

“It would be really, really bad and morally wrong of all of you to go to ProLifeWhistleblower.com and send in an anonymous tip that is fake,” Olivia sarcastically told her more than 137,000 followers in an Aug. 23 video she posted on TikTok. “It would be even worse if your anonymous tip was about Greg Abbott.”

Another popular content creator and Deputy Executive Director of Gen Z for Change, Victoria Hammett, 22, saw her video and found it “absolutely brilliant” and encouraged her followers to do the same.

“Wouldn’t it be so awful if we send in a bunch of fake tips and crashed the site?” she said in a TikTok that’s been liked over 240,000 times.

Create a morally reprehensible website, you’re going to face some consequences. Three cheers for the activists who are giving them the response they deserve.

And it’s not just the Gen Z activists, too.

After a Texas law restricting abortion went into effect Wednesday, an antiabortion organization had hoped to out those involved in unlawful procedures by collecting anonymous tips online.

But Texas Right to Life’s website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, which invited people to inform on those obtaining or facilitating abortions, has not stayed up for long, as website registration providers have said the online form to submit “whistleblower” reports violates their rules. On Monday, the organization confirmed that the website redirects to its main page as it seeks to find a new digital home for the form.

“We’re exploring various long-term plans for the domain registration,” the group’s spokeswoman, Kimberlyn Schwartz, told The Washington Post. “For now, ProLifeWhistleblower.com is redirecting to TexasRightToLife.com only while we move hosts.”

After hosting provider GoDaddy booted the group from its platform last week, the site’s registration changed to list Epik, a Web hosting company that has supported other websites that tech companies have rejected, such as Gab and 8chan. The site went offline Saturday, however, after the domain registrar told the Texas organization that lobbied for the abortion ban that it had violated the company’s terms of service.

After speaking with Epik, which never hosted the site, Texas Right to Life agreed to remove the form, Epik general counsel Daniel Prince said Monday. By late Saturday, the website had redirected to Texas Right to Life’s main page.

But Schwartz said the group still hopes to solicit tips.

“It will be back up soon to continue collecting anonymous tips,” she said, adding that the group is reviewing its options, including seeking another company to register the site’s domain.

Prince said Epik would no longer offer its services if the group continues to collect private information about third parties through its digital tip line.

I’m sure they will eventually find a hosting company that is sleazy enough to allow them to use their services. Putting all of the politics aside for a moment, however, that bit about “[collecting] private information about third parties” should raise some serious data privacy red flags. I guarantee you, the owners of the snitch site have no plan to protect any of that data, and any information they do get will be at serious risk of being abused. Merrick Garland, as you formulate your response, please take note of that as well. The Current has more.

The contract health worker surge

Sep 6th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Don’t know how sustainable this is.

Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, president and CEO of Harris Health System, said the hospitals in the system were at a breaking point when he learned that 100 temporary medical workers were being sent to help.

As cases surged, the hospitals were admitting more children and pregnant women with complications from COVID-19, and patients who needed intensive care waited in emergency rooms for ICU beds to become available.

The nurses, respiratory therapists and other contract staff “definitely arrived here at a pivotal moment,” Porsa said. “They did exactly what I had hoped that they would do, which is allowing us the opportunity of a couple of things: to provide a little bit of relief for front-line staff who have been running around ragged, but also created an opportunity for us to expand our capacity.”

[…]

Gov. Greg Abbott announced the Texas Department of State Health Services would deploy state-funded relief workers to hospitals, and 8,100 have either arrived from other states or are expected soon.

It’s the second time the state has taken such action. At the height of the state’s winter surge, almost 14,000 medical workers were deployed across the state, according to DSHS. From July 2020 to early August of this year, the state spent more than $5 billion in federal disaster funds and coronavirus relief funds on medical personnel.

Abbott’s move came after hospitals and local health officials complained that they were having to outbid each other to hire contract nurses amid a statewide shortage of hospital staff.

W. Stephen Love, president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council, said that competition among hospitals meant “they’re going to take from Peter to give to Paul, so to speak. That’s why using the state with their purchasing power [is important].”

The new push to bring more health workers to Texas comes as many have reached their limits, said Carrie Williams, spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association.

“This surge has come faster and stronger than previous surges, and it comes at a time when the frontline [worker] is burned out,” Williams said in a statement. “We were already starting from behind when this surge hit.”

According to DSHS, the state’s hospitals requested more than 15,000 temporary staffers between Aug. 12 and Aug. 25. As of Aug. 25, almost 4,000 have been deployed, with most going to regions with the state’s most populous counties and metro areas.

[…]

Health officials continue to stress that the main way to reduce the need for additional staff is clear: more vaccinations. As of Aug. 25, about 47% of Texans were fully vaccinated.

Since Jan. 1, Porsa said, everyone who has died at LBJ Hospital and Ben Taub Hospital from COVID-19 has been unvaccinated.

“Space is not unlimited, resources are not unlimited,” Porsa said. “At some point it doesn’t matter how many nurses you throw at the problem, we are going to arrive at a situation where we’re not going to have enough clinicians, we’re not going to have enough doctors, we’re not going to have enough something else.

“We will run out of options at some point, and this is really really important for people to realize that this cannot go on forever, and they know what the solution is.”

It’s still not clear to me how there could even be that many not currently working medical staff out there to be brought in, but they do exist in some number, for which we are grateful and lucky. It’s also not clear at what point demand will outstrip supply, and as noted above, we may run into other limits even sooner than that.

How long can we last? There’s actually a tiny bit of cause for optimism in the most recent data.

The average number of daily COVID hospitalizations in the Texas Medical Center dropped for the first time since early July from a record 390 patients to 388, the medical center reported Monday.

The metric reflects the daily average of hospitalized patients over the previous week. The drop comes amid declining COVID hospitalizations both nationally and statewide.
A three-day decline in total COVID hospitalizations in Texas brought the number to 13,557 on Saturday, the most recent day for which data is available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reported a drop in the average number of new daily hospitalizations nationwide, from 12,354 on Thursday to 12,051 on Friday. More recent national data is not yet available.

Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, said the decline is part of the natural course of the pandemic.

“When you see an outbreak like this, the virus kind of runs through the population until it gets to the point where it starts running out of people to infect,” he said, adding, “That does not mean herd immunity.”

He warned that the virus still has room to spread, especially as schools reopen. In an interview last week, McDeavitt said hospitals will continue to feel the strain of the current surge as cases decline.

Burnout among nurses, lingering staffing shortages and the record number of hospitalizations all factor into a longer recovery period.

“From the peak, we’re probably still a month-and-a-half to getting to something that feels like business as usual,” he said last week. “So best case, we’re into October now before we start to get some relief.”

So don’t get too cocky. It’s good that maybe we’ve peaked and will start to see a decline, but we’re still a long way out from where we were in May and June, and we could easily reverse course again. We need to keep getting people vaccinated, because the alternative is more of what we’re going through now.

Zombie trees

Sep 3rd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

We are still experiencing the effects of the freeze.

Never turn down an opportunity to reference a Rush song

Zombies are in your yard, in parks and along roadsides and other green spaces throughout Texas.

They’re trees that are partly dead and partly alive, struggling to move forward and waiting for the next big thing — even hotter temperatures, a drought, a hurricane — to seal their fate.

Count zombie trees as one more lingering effect of February’s winter storm.

Arborists and other tree experts say that in the months to come, the state could lose thousands if not millions of trees ranging from tall Mexican or California fan palms to a wide range of hardwoods such as lace bark elm, Chinese tallow and water oak. This would be the most dangerous threat to Texas’s tree inventory since the 2011 drought.

Trees with lots of dead branches and new green sprouts shooting out of the center are likely zombie trees. Even tall palms with new green fronds on top could be zombies, because you can’t see the potential damage inside of their lanky trunks.

Matt Petty, assistant district manager and a certified arborist at the Davey Tree Expert Co., said that the International Society of Arboriculture is calling for a two-year watch on trees damaged in the freeze.

“The zombie tree concept comes from trees that, from a distance, appear to be normal or healthy and as you get closer, you see the differences. They’re dead and we don’t know it yet,” Petty said, noting that the trees could have been struggling before the freeze. “Trees that lost their leaves from the freeze have sprouted out and, in many cases, look like they have recovered. As temperatures heat up, though, we’ll have trees that die.”

Petty said that he’s seen sycamores, rain trees, Chinese tallow, elms and water oaks suffering damage, but live oaks and magnolia trees — both popular shade trees in the Houston area — are doing well.

[…]

David N. Appel, a Texas A&M professor and a specialist in tree pathology noted that “zombie tree” isn’t a horticultural or agricultural term and showed restraint in using it.

He said that most trees with dead-looking branches and new shoots coming from the center could be zombie trees, but not all are. They’re certainly damaged trees, some of which will live and some of which will die, and it’s fairly obvious which branches should be pruned back.

“I’ve been from the Rio Grande all the way up to Wichita Falls, and I have talked to a lot of arborists and one thing is clear: The damage was remarkably similar, it’s just that the species were different depending on where you are,” Appel said. “In one place you hear a lot about lace bark elms, but in another place it might be some of the oak species. In Wichita Falls it was the Japanese black pine and Mondell pine.”

Appel said Texas will lose hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of trees.

“The picture has become much clearer than it was two months ago, but we still (won’t know the fate of) a lot of these trees for a long while,” he said. “We aren’t out of the woods yet, and that’s not a tree joke.”

The story references the 2011 drought, which was hell on trees in Houston and around the state, and Hurricane Harvey, neither of which is a great comparison for arborial life. Some trees, like palms, were recognizably dead following the February freeze, but for others it may not be certain for another year or two. For those of us who live in neighborhoods with older trees, it is worth the time and expense to have an arborist look at the trees around your house, because dead branches are a real threat in a big storm. Hope for the best, and do what you can to take care of the trees on your property.

Please enjoy the higher natural gas prices you’ll soon be paying

Sep 1st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

And by “enjoy”, I mean “blame Greg Abbott”.

Texans are on the hook for $3.6 billion in natural gas costs incurred by utilities during one freezing week in February — a burden consumers will bear for a decade or longer.

During that same winter week, several natural gas pipeline companies and traders made billions of dollars as they transported and sold natural gas at sky-high prices when supplies were short.

Pipeline companies Energy Transfer of Dallas and Kinder Morgan of Houston made $2.4 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, while British oil major BP made more than $1 billion from its natural-gas trading business during the deadly, historic storm, according to company filings and analyst estimates. Houston pipeline company Enterprise Products Partners said it made $250 million for transporting and selling natural gas at high prices to utilities, industrial customers and power generators during the storm.

Ultimately, Texans will fund these companies’ profits, said Jim Krane, an energy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“It’s pretty clear this is a wealth transfer from the public to investors and traders who could capitalize on the high prices,” Krane said. “The frustrating thing is, even though people were shivering in their homes, their (natural gas) bills are going up anyway. They’re still going to have to pay for this. It’s really a slap in the face.”

More than 1.8 million CenterPoint Energy customers in the Houston area are responsible for the $1.14 billion natural gas bill incurred by the Houston utility when it had to quickly buy natural gas at sky-high prices after demand soared and supplies plunged during the storm.

[…]

Utilities such as CenterPoint pass along the cost of natural gas to customers without any markup and instead make money on its natural gas business through state-regulated distribution fees.

CenterPoint on Friday filed a request with regulators to finance the billions of dollars in excess gas costs. The paperwork submitted to the Railroad Commission outlined how much the financing would cost Houstonians in the coming years, reflected in their monthly bill.

The average natural gas bill in the Houston area — about $30 — could go up by $2 to $5 a month starting next year if CenterPoint is allowed to use state-issued bonds to finance what it owes for that high-priced gas. That means Houstonians could pay as much as $60 more a year for their natural gas over the next decade.

If CenterPoint’s request is rejected, it would levy a fee of $15 to $40 a month over the next year, pushing the average gas bill to almost $80 during summer and to more than $100 in winter. That means Houstonians could pay as much as $480 more for their natural gas over the next year.

The cost would hit everyone in CenterPoint’s territory, even if they couldn’t turn on their natural-gas heating systems because of rolling blackouts, Krane said.

“You either buy your local bill collector a six-pack or a gym membership,” Krane said. “It’s not insubstantial. For some people, it’s going to be pretty tough news if you’re just hanging on.”

See here for some background. As a reminder, this is how the system was designed to work. And of course, Greg Abbott benefited from that transfer of wealth, because that too is how the system is designed to work.

Readin’ and writin’ and gettin’ COVID

Aug 30th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Welcome back to school, kids.

Positive COVID-19 cases among Texas public school students rose by more than 9,000 last week, the highest number ever recorded in a seven-day period, state data shows.

As of Aug. 22, there were 14,033 reports of positive COVID cases in students across the state, according to data released by Texas Health and Human Services on Friday. The number represents a 182 percent increase from the 4,976 student cases reported through Aug. 15.

There were another 3,425 positive cases reported in school staff across the state, an increase of 712 from the previous week.

In some districts, more than half the new infections are among elementary school students, who are not eligible for any of the available vaccines.

“This school year is gonna look a whole lot different than last year,” said Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UTHealth School of Public Health in Dallas. “We have a whole lot more transmission now in the community and we have the delta variant.”

The cumulative number of cases in students since the 2021-2022 school year began is 20,256. The total staff cases so far this school year is 7,488.

In case you were wondering why so many parents are pissed about the fight against mask mandates. Now that all schools are open I would hope we won’t see any more big jumps like that, but we are going to see the case levels rise for now. I hope that at some point, when there’s enough data to be reasonably confident in the results, we can get a comparison of COVID rates in districts that have mandated masks versus those that have not.

On a related note:

People under 50 are being admitted to hospitals with COVID-19 in larger numbers than at any point during the pandemic as the latest surge of the coronavirus continues to tighten its grip on Texas.

According to data released by the Texas Department of State Health Services, as of Aug. 22, adults 30 to 49 now account for roughly 29% of all COVID-19 hospital admissions in Texas, up from 15% on Jan. 11 during the height of the winter surge.

The data shows that people in the 18-29 age group increased their share of admissions during that period from 5% to 7%, while the percentage of children under 18 admitted to hospitals with COVID-19 increased by 1 percentage point — an average of 46 children each day were hospitalized during the week ending Aug 22.

Meanwhile, fewer people over 70 are landing in hospitals with COVID-19. During the winter peak, about 41% of hospitalized COVID patients were over 70. As of Aug. 22, that dropped by almost half, to 23%.

The data confirmed what many doctors have been saying in recent weeks about the delta variant sending younger people into hospitals at a higher rate than earlier in the pandemic.

“We are seeing certainly younger patients hospitalized and younger patients on ventilators where we haven’t seen that before,” said Dr. Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

This variant has spread faster among unvaccinated Texans of all ages. As of last week, between 93% and 98% of hospitalizations have been unvaccinated people, depending on the area of Texas, officials said.

More than 70% of Texans over the age of 50 are fully vaccinated, compared to only about half of Texans between the ages of 16 and 49 and one-third of those ages 12-15. Children under age 12 are not eligible for vaccination.

And as the hospitals fill up with COVID patients, people who have other serious but treatable conditions are put in jeopardy. No amount of horse de-wormer is gonna fix that.

More teenagers are getting vaccinated

Aug 25th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good, but not enough in itself.

As a third COVID wave coincides with the back-to-school season, more Texas teenagers are getting the vaccine — but health experts say they need to see shots increase in even larger numbers to protect children from the delta variant.

Vaccinations have gone up recently among all Texas age groups, especially for those under 50, and they’ve more than doubled over the past six weeks for 12- to 17-year-olds.

In the last week of June, about 36,000 Texans under 18 got a shot — the lowest point to date — but that number shot up to 86,000 two weeks ago and remained there last week, according to new data from the state health department.

The jump is promising for public health experts, who stress that vaccines are the best way to avoid severe illness and slow the spread of the coronavirus. Still, youth vaccination rates are the lowest of all age groups in Texas, with just 49 percent of those under 18 getting at least one shot, compared to much higher rates for their elders.

“The percent of adolescents that are eligible for vaccination and have been vaccinated, certainly in Houston and in Texas, is still quite low,” said Dr. Stan Spinner, the vice president and chief medical officer for Texas Children’s Pediatrics and Texas Children’s Urgent Care in Houston. “Yes, the numbers are going up. That’s encouraging. But they’re not going up fast enough.”

About 46 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds, who have been eligible for the Pfizer vaccine since May, have received a shot. Roughly 55 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds have gotten the shot, according to the health department data.

Meanwhile, the number of pediatric COVID cases and hospitalizations has exploded — more than 500 children are currently hospitalized with the virus in Texas. Children account for about 20 percent of all positive COVID tests at Texas Medical Center, Spinner said.

“They are the major component of the population that’s vulnerable,” he said. “They have not been able to get vaccinated, and we know kids get it. We’re seeing it. It’s not a myth. We’re seeing it in larger numbers than ever.”

The increase in vaccinations is unequivocally good, I want to be clear about that. But there are still two concerns. One is that the rate of increase is not enough. About one-fourth of all Texans are under 18, which means in absolute terms between seven and eight million people. Not all of them are currently eligible for the vaccine, but at a rough guess it’s probably two to three million. Even at 100K shots a week, it’ll take us months and months to get to a sufficient level of immunization. We need to increase that 86K figure by a factor of at least five, maybe even ten.

And two, as we well know, while even the first shot conveys some extra level of protection from COVID from the get-go, it takes a month from the first shot to be really protected. We need to be doing more in the here and now to help mitigate the spread of this plague. We all know the drill – masking, avoiding indoor gatherings, social distancing – but as long as our malicious Governor and malignant Attorney General are doing everything in their power to prevent those things, we’re going to continue putting everyone in a maximal amount of jeopardy. We’ve already seen high infection rates in school districts that have been open, and several districts forced to close down in person instruction in the short term. We know what needs to be done. It’s Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton and Dan Patrick who want to stop us from doing them. We can’t let them put our kids, and ourselves, in such danger.

The approval and the mandates

Aug 24th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the FDA has given its final approval to the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19. That should mean a lot of good things, but among them it should mean broader vaccine mandates are now in play.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine Monday is cracking open the door for Texas cities, counties and school districts to compel their employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19 — moves previously blocked by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Abbott had banned public schools and local governments from enacting their own vaccine mandates. But the governor’s executive order specifies that the ban on mandates applies to COVID-19 vaccines that are under emergency authorization — a designation that no longer applies to the Pfizer two-dose vaccination.

Already, one major school district is pressing forward with its plan to require vaccinations for teachers and staff.

Pedro Martinez, superintendent for San Antonio Independent School District, called for mandatory employee vaccinations last week — drawing a lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton, who accused the district and Martinez of breaching Abbott’s ban on vaccine mandates.

But with the FDA’s approval, San Antonio school officials are moving forward with their vaccine requirement for district employees.

In a statement, Martinez called the FDA approval “a positive step forward in the fight against COVID-19 nationwide and a step forward in helping keep schools safe for learning here at home.”

Here’s Superintendent Martinez on CNN discussing his fight against Greg Abbott over this. Most of the fights so far have been about mask mandates, but as we noted recently, San Antonio ISD has notified its employees that they must get vaccinated, which has drawn a lawsuit from Ken Paxton. Which, apparently, has been withdrawn now, as the executive order against vaccine mandates only covered “vaccines administered under an emergency use authorization”.

Here’s more from the Chron.

The Pfizer vaccine’s change in status appears to give cities, school districts and universities a way around the governor’s ban.

“Receiving a COVID-19 vaccine under an emergency use authorization is always voluntary in Texas and will never be mandated by the government, but it is strongly encouraged for those eligible to receive one,” Abbott’s most recent executive order reads.

A spokeswoman for Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The update means San Antonio Independent School District, which was sued by the state after requiring its employees to get the shots by Oct. 15, is still moving forward with its mandate. The district had clarified late last week that it would not compel workers to get a vaccine that wasn’t fully approved by the FDA.

Attorney General Ken Paxton touted that as a win in a news release Monday, distributed less than an hour after the FDA granted full approval.

“State law could not be clearer: ‘No governmental entity can compel any individual to receive a COVID-19 vaccine administered under an emergency use authorization,’” Paxton said in the release. “But San Antonio ISD tried to play by its own set of rules. Thankfully, we stopped them.”

San Antonio school officials say the full authorization now allows the district to go ahead with its requirement that all employees get the shots by mid-October, they say. In his clarification statement last week, Superintendent Pedro Martinez had stipulated that the timeline would only change if the FDA hadn’t fully authorized the vaccine by Sept. 10.

Hey, if you want to declare victory while you’re surrendering and retreating, it’s fine by me. Just keep on surrendering and retreating, that’s all I ask.

The remaining questions are 1) What about Moderna and J&J; 2) What will other government entities do about this new ability; and 3) What about the mask mandates? In short,

1) “In May, Pfizer and BioNTech submitted their license application. Moderna began its application in June, and Johnson & Johnson said it will begin the process later this year.” As such, I’d assume the Moderna approval will come sometime in September or October, and J&J will be later than that. But most people have Pfizer or Moderna shots, so that’s the main thing.

2) My guess is they will move more slowly, but once the first domino falls I’d expect others to follow quickly. Note that this will be about mandates for local government employees, not residents. It’ll help, but it won’t apply to everyone.

3) Not the same thing, so we’re still waiting for the lawsuits to play out.

In the meantime, go tell all your vax-hesitant family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances, and whoever else that now is the time for them to get their shots. It’s all officially approved, there’s no need to wait any longer.

The mask rebellion

Aug 22nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
18 comments

Sweet, sweet music to the ears.

The local mask rebellion, coupled with the fresh threat of legal action from President Joe Biden’s administration, poses the most serious challenge yet to [Gov. Greg] Abbott’s emergency powers, which he has wielded in unprecedented ways that have drawn intense criticism both from Democrats and from some conservatives.

[…]

Many school boards and superintendents are stuck between conflicting requirements from the governor and their local health departments, while others feel that masks are essential and that they have the authority to control their own schools, regardless of the governor’s wishes.

“I don’t think the governor has an MD next to his name,” said Conrado Garcia, superintendent of West Oso Independent School District in Corpus Christi. “We’re just trying to help our kids, and maybe what’s missing is some of that kind of thinking.”

West Oso is one of 58 school districts deemed “noncompliant” with Abbott’s order by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is publishing a list of the rogue government entities.

At last count, the list also included three charter school groups, one city and eight counties — Bexar, Cameron, Dallas, Harris, Hays, Hidalgo, Nueces and Travis — for a total of 70 entities. Paxton, who is also suing to overturn some of the local mandates, encouraged the public to notify his office of any “violator” that was not included on the list.

Garcia said he hopes Abbott will come around on the local mask mandates.

“Our intention is not to fight the governor, our intentions are that he will realize that there’s so many parents, and the list is growing of the number of school districts that are passing more and more resolutions,” Garcia said. “So I think eventually, somewhere, somehow, common sense dictates to me that if you’re hearing from that many people, I hope that he will compromise and let us continue with our work.”

The cases pose a new legal test for Abbott, whose emergency orders withstood early challenges from the right, filed by conservative groups that argued against business closures and the governor’s own mask mandate.

The Texas Supreme Court decided last year that it didn’t have standing to take up those cases, though Justice John Devine nonetheless issued an opinion in which he critiqued a portion of state law that allows the governor to suspend certain laws and rules during emergencies.

“I find it difficult to square this statute, and the orders made under it, with the Texas Constitution,” Devine wrote, noting that only the Legislature — not the judiciary or executive branches — has constitutional power to suspend laws.

In the latest mask challenges, local officials are citing the same portion of state law, but with the opposite intent: to stop Abbott from blocking local action aimed at blunting the spread of COVID. In cases involving San Antonio’s and Dallas’ mask mandates, local officials have argued that Abbott may suspend only local orders that would “in any way prevent, hinder or delay necessary action in coping with a disaster.”

Ron Beal, an attorney and former administrative law professor at Baylor University, sided with the local officials in an amicus brief submitted to the state Supreme Court on Monday.

“It is wholly inconsistent with the legislative intent for the governor to consciously and knowingly not meet or prevent the dangers, but to enhance them,” Beal said. “There is simply no language in the statute that empowers the governor to give citizens permission to prolong the disaster. It is thereby void.”

[Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at Southern Methodist University], said the case raises difficult constitutional questions for the conservative jurists on the court.

“That cuts a number of ways in this case, both for and against the governor, because he’s acting in a way that many conservatives believe is reinforcing individual rights to choice, choice about wearing masks specifically,” Carpenter said. “But I think the court certainly doesn’t want to issue an opinion that says the governor’s the commander-in-chief and he can do what he wants, and not qualify that opinion a lot.”

[…]

Paris ISD, in Northeast Texas, has taken a novel approach to its own mask mandate. While other districts have argued that health data or conflicting local requirements required them to ignore Abbott’s order, Paris ISD’s board simply amended its dress code to include a mask.

The lawyer for the district, Dennis Eichelbaum, argues that so long as the state’s education law remains in place, school districts have the exclusive right to govern themselves. Unless Abbott decides to use his emergency powers to suspend that law, Eichelbaum argues, school districts can institute mask mandates.

“We’ve always had dress codes. It’s very common in Texas. And this is no different, really, than saying we’re requiring our students to wear shoes,” he said. “I can’t explain why other law firms weren’t as creative, but it seems pretty simple to me.”

Eichelbaum argued that Abbott’s executive order is vague and inconsistently enforced, pointing to requirements that students wear face masks during welding class or that baseball catchers and football players wear face protection. Amending a dress code to include masks to protect against COVID is no different, Eichelbaum said.

Obviously, I am delighted by the resistance to Abbott’s shameful demagoguery on this issue. Abbott, who has made a career out of defying federal laws and directives he doesn’t like, deserves no sympathy for any of this. I don’t know what the Supreme Court will do, though their refusal to just call an end to all the litigation is moderately heartening, and I appreciate the legal analysis in this story. There’s at least a chance that common sense can prevail, and that’s more than we’ve had around here in awhile.

I will say, it’s been this kind of resistance to Abbott’s anti-mask mandate, which as noted has come from some red areas as well as the cities, that makes me give some credence to that Spectrum/Ipsos poll. Abbott may only care about the most fervid of Republican primary voters, but mayors and school boards have to answer to a broader electorate, and some of them will be facing that music this year. Maybe one of the HISD Trustee candidates, especially one in a district formerly held by a Republican, will base their campaign on an anti-mask platform, but if so I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet. If nothing else, this is a big campaign issue for next year, when we finally get a candidate for Governor out there.

I don’t know what to make of these Spectrum/Ipsos polls about COVID and mask mandates

Aug 21st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

I’m going to present to you three Spectrum News stories about a poll they commissioned regarding COVID issues, and then I’m going to tell you what I think about them. (Spoiler alert: The post title more or less sums it up, but I will go into more detail.)

Spectrum News/Ipsos poll finds Texas parents want common-sense precautions against COVID in schools.

Most Texans are not aligned with Gov. Greg Abbott when it comes to mask mandates and requiring vaccinations for teachers, students and staff at schools, according to an exclusive Spectrum News/Ipsos poll released this week.

The poll, which comprised more than 1,300 people, including more than 400 parents of school-aged children, was intended to gauge the pulse of how Texans are feeling about state policies, specific politicians and a few hot-button issues.

Generally speaking, the survey suggests, parents’ attitudes toward how the state is handling various issues related to education and schools are all over the place, said Mallory Newall, vice president of public affairs for Ipsos, a French-based analytics company. For example, about two-thirds of parents said they feel their child would be safe returning to school, yet two-thirds also fear their child will catch COVID-19.

“On one hand, a majority of parents are confident that their child will be able to make up lost ground [from missed time],” she said. “They feel that their child would be safe attending school, but there is this concern in the back of their mind about them catching COVID at school.

“So, I would say that in all of that together, parents’ concern isn’t necessarily outweighing their desire for their kids to return to in-person schools,” she continued. “However, most parents want to see common-sense policies in place to protect their kids and to keep them safe. And for those that want them, they feel that virtual options should still be made available.”

[…]

The Spectrum News/Ipsos poll showed Texans generally disapprove of Abbott’s handling of COVID-19, and when it comes to certain proposals around COVID-19 and back to school, the public is also misaligned with the governor. For example, only 17% of all Texans, and 22% of parents with a school-aged child, believe students who test positive for COVID-19 should not have to quarantine. In another example of Texans disagreeing with Abbott’s orders, nine in 10 believe schools should be required to notify parents if a child or teacher tests positive — regardless of whether it’s in their classroom (92% support) or in the school as a whole (89% support).

Around half of the people surveyed said they are worried about their children’s mental health (49%), and roughly the same number said their children suffered during the pandemic (47%).

Also, breaking with the governor’s actions, the poll showed broad support for requiring vaccines for teachers and students and providing virtual learning in schools. Support for these proposals is significantly different by party. Though there is low support among Republicans, significant majorities of Democrats and independents favor these policies, leading to overall high levels of support.

Spectrum News/Ipsos poll finds COVID is a major factor in back-to-school concerns.

Parents feel safe allowing their children to return to in-school learning, but, at the same time, most fear their child will catch COVID-19. This seemingly contradictory revelation is part of an exclusive Spectrum News/Ipsos poll released this week.

As the debate about how to handle getting children safely back to school continues nationwide, Ipsos, a global research insight and analytics company, gathered data on this and other current news topics from more than 1,300 Texans, including more than 400 parents of school-aged children.

The poll found that two-thirds of parents (64%) said they feel their child would be safe returning to school, yet two-thirds (66%) also fear their child will catch COVID-19.

The poll revealed that Texans’ feelings toward COVID-19 don’t generally align with Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders, but they are still supportive of classrooms being open — for those who want it.

[…]

Around half of parents, 49%, approve of Abbott’s plans for sending children back to school, and parents do not differ from the general public on this (47% of parents with kids 4-17 approve). Notably, just 39% of Texans agree that policymakers in the state are making decisions about COVID-19 that are based on science. Republican parents are the only demographic group in the survey in which a majority agree with this statement.

The survey found about half of Texas parents say they are worried about their child right now (49%), that their mental health has suffered during the pandemic (47%), and that they do not/would not have enough time to help with remote learning (49%).

Spectrum News/Ipsos Poll finds Texans are leery of policymakers when it comes to COVID.

As Texans are left to fend for themselves against COVID, Abbott’s popularity has taken a hit. The Spectrum News/Ipsos Poll found that only 46% of Texans approve of the job he’s doing overall, compared to just over half last year. Most (53%) disapprove.

Overwhelmingly, the pandemic is the issue most Texans are focused on, the poll found, and it’s also the issue Abbott is doing worst on. Now, just 43% approve of the job he’s doing on COVID-19, compared to 49-58% for other issues in the survey. Last year, his approval rating on the coronavirus was more evenly split (48% approved, 43% disapproved in 2020).

The only person Texans trust less than Abbott on COVID is former president Donald Trump. Exactly half, on the other hand, trust President Joe Biden to provide them accurate information on COVID-19.

One demographic that appears to struggle with Abbott’s decisions related to COVID is parents, who are left to grapple with the prospect of sending their children back to schools that offer little state-mandated protection against the deadly virus.

The Spectrum News/Ipsos Poll found 72% of parents support mask requirements in K-12 schools. The data showed significant differences of opinion by race, ethnicity and political party. However, even half or more Republicans support mask requirements in offices, grocery and retail stores, transit hubs and sports stadiums.

When it comes to certain proposals around COVID-19 and back to school, the public is once again misaligned with the governor. For example, just 17% of all Texans, and 22% of parents with a school-aged child, support the following proposal: “Students who test positive for COVID-19 should not have to quarantine.” On the other hand, nine in 10 believe schools should be required to notify parents if a child or teacher tests positive — regardless of whether it’s in their classroom (92% support) or in the school as a whole (89% support).

There is broad support for requiring vaccines for teachers and students alike. Support for these proposals is significantly different by political party. Though there is low support among Republicans, significant majorities of Democrats and independents favor these policies, leading to overall high levels of support.

I found the first link via Reform Austin. The other two I found via Google search, though as you can see there’s some overlap among them.

This is normally where I would link to the poll data, and that is my first and biggest problem with this: I can’t find any link to poll data, in any of these stories. That means I know nothing about the sample used – it seems clear this is a poll of all adults, but it doesn’t say how many are registered to vote, and of course there’s no breakdown by age, race and ethnicity, gender, partisanship, etc – or whether it was a phone or online poll or a hybrid, or what the question wording was, etc etc etc.

Note how inexact some of the data points cited in the stories are – “significant majorities of Democrats and independents favor these policies”, “even half or more Republicans support mask requirements”, “he only person Texans trust less than Abbott on COVID is former president Donald Trump”, and so on. What does any of that mean? How wide are the partisan splits? Especially for the approval questions, the partisan makeup of the sample, and how they voted in 2020 – and how many of them didn’t vote in 2020 – is a big deal. All I have here is vague gestures.

I mean, none of these results strike me as outlandish. The national polling data we have (see here for an example, and I just now noticed that’s also an Ipsos poll, released at the same time as this poll, which makes me wonder) suggests that Abbott’s extreme stances are out of line with what normal people think, and I can believe/absolutely want to believe that his approval rating has dipped as a result. But you know the mantra: It’s just one poll, and it has no data that I can parse. I can only go so far with that.

If we’re lucky, this means that there’s about to be some more polling to come. It’s been a couple of months since the last round of polls, and so maybe the usual suspects will be out in the field soon. Lord knows, there’s plenty for them to ask about. I’ll be keeping an eye out as always.

A few words from the CEO of the Medical Center

Aug 21st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
10 comments

From an interview he did with Lisa Gray.

What we’re seeing, sadly, is more of the same, only with more intense numbers. The number of people who are testing positive in our community continues to escalate month over month. The test positivity rate is now at 15.1 percent.

But probably the most accurate reflection is our hospitalizations. We just reached an all-time high: 421 people were admitted to our hospitals for COVID yesterday.

Step back for a second and look at that relative to the entire pandemic. Back in June and July, we had two weeks where the average number of hospital admissions was over 300. That was in the second wave.

Fast forward to wave three: We had four weeks that averaged over 300.

Now we are into our second week with no slowing the pace. At 421 today, we are seeing the highest peak of all of the pandemic going back 18 months now.

It’s largely a pandemic of the unwilling — people unwilling to be vaccinated. Now 44% of Houstonians are unvaccinated. Those are the vast majority of the people that are showing up in our emergency rooms and and in our ICUs. They’re very sick.

Many people thought that they were young, and therefore their immune system would be strong enough to protect them. That is not the case with this deadly delta variant, which is three times more transmissible than the earlier alpha variant.

Our hospitals’ staffs are 18 months into this. They’re exhausted.

And we have far fewer nurses than we used to have. They’re being recruited to other states, like Florida, that are even worse off than Texas.

The saddest fact is, 18 percent of all the new cases so far in August are children.

With the alpha variant, everyone thought, “OK, it’s 65 and older.” So we went after the nursing homes, and we did a brilliant job at protecting the elderly population and those who are immunocompromised.

But now, that vulnerable population is children under 12, who are not able to be vaccinated. We are predicting a mess in our schools. With nearly 20 percent of new cases being children, now we’re going to huddle them together in schools? Some may have masks. Some may not. It’s a recipe for disaster.

You can read the rest or give it a listen, but his answer to the first question tells you most of what you need to know. Hospitals around the state have been facing a similar crisis. I keep harping on this because it needs to be harped on, as we have a governor who can’t follow his own dictum about “responsible behavior”, a felonious Attorney General who’s soliciting snitches so he can go after rogue mask mandates, and a Legislature that wants to ban mask mandates forever. This is what we’re up against.

I don’t know if I’d call this “good news”, but the projections say we can see the beginning of the end from here.

While hospitalization numbers are nearing the heights they reached during the state’s most fatal surge in January, public health projections indicate that the latest wave will result in fewer deaths — mostly because senior citizens are widely vaccinated and hospital patients are now much younger. Still, state health officials are preparing for the worst, preemptively ordering a fleet of five mortuary trailers from the federal government in case infections spiral.

Public health experts still expect at least some increase in coronavirus deaths over the coming weeks, as fatalities are a lagging indicator — cases rise first, then hospitalizations, then intensive care usage, then deaths.

Now, the state is averaging about 100 daily deaths, a number not expected to exceed 150 over the next month before tapering off. That’s nowhere near the 350 COVID deaths per day that the state saw in January.

“We’ll go up some, but again, not to the levels that we saw back in January,” said Dr. David Lakey, the vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer at the University of Texas system, referencing the forecasts.

Still, the precipitous rise in hospitalizations is a cause for concern. More than 12,000 Texans were in the hospital with the virus on Wednesday, with dozens of Texas hospitals running out of ICU beds (during the winter surge, hospitalizations peaked at just over 14,000). Patients are younger than they were in the first two waves of the virus, and almost everyone facing severe illness is unvaccinated.

[…]

Projection models following Texas’ daily COVID case and hospitalization counts anticipate a rise in deaths in the near future. By mid-September, a model offered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the Lone Star State will see about 790 deaths per week, or roughly 113 per day.

Another model, produced by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, projects about 125 deaths per day by mid-September in a worst-case scenario. In both forecasts, it appears that the state has already seen the brunt of its COVID deaths.

That’s largely because the vast majority of Texas’ over-65 population — those most vulnerable to the coronavirus — have received at least one dose of the vaccine, experts said.

“Those that were most at risk of having severe disease have some protection, and that’s good protection because of the vaccine,” Lakey said.

While a spike in hospitalizations and ICU bed usage does portend fatalities, the relationship between those data points will be less “linear” during the third wave, he said. It remains to be seen whether young patients will have other, long-term side effects of the virus — what some are calling “long COVID.”

Deaths will also decrease as more people become vaccinated or recover from the illness, said Dr. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metric science at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The institute’s researchers estimate that about 74 percent of Texans will be immune to the delta variant, either through infection or vaccination, by Dec. 1.

“The virus is running out of people to infect,” he said.

The forecasts should not be interpreted as an assured outcome, though. Public buy-in on safety precautions, including mask-wearing, will ultimately determine the trajectory of the third wave.

In other words, don’t expect a best-case outcome, because we’re not allowed to do the things we need to do to make this less awful. Note also that while extensive vaccinations among older folks will help to limit fatalities, there will still be an excess of deaths in the coming weeks because of the overfilled hospitals – people with other serious conditions will die as a result, as was the case in the previous waves. Now is a very bad time to have a heart attack or be in a car crash.

At least there is a rise in the rate of people getting vaccinated, now that the threat is so much higher. Some of that is the result of mandates and restrictions on unvaccinated people, some is due to pressures and enticements from employers, and some is due to straight up financial rewards. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes.

The abortion ban chaos is coming

Aug 17th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

It’s already ugly.

Right there with them

The National Abortion Federation has told doctors in Texas it will stop referring patients and sending money to clinics that offer abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

In North Texas, the Texas Equal Action Fund will likely “pause” its ride share program that helps women reach abortion appointments.

Dr. Bhavik Kumar, an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood, has cleared his schedule to fit in as many patients as he can before the end of the month.

And online, the group Texas Right to Life has launched a website for whistleblowers who want to potentially help sue Kumar and doctors just like him, beginning Sept. 1.

With only days left until the country’s first six-week abortion ban rolls out in Texas, abortion clinics and their supporters are bracing for a virtual shutdown of legal access to the procedure, at least for several weeks. Some clinics in the state are preparing not only to abide by the new guidelines, but to go beyond them, shuttering their abortion offerings entirely.

“This law is senseless, it’s not in the best interest of the people of Texas,” said Kumar. “But it is the law, and if it passes, we have to comply.”

What unfolds over the coming weeks could have broad ripple effects. Even a brief pause in access in Texas, the second most populous state, could affect thousands of pregnant women and encourage similar laws across much of the South and Midwest, where abortion care is already limited.

[…]

“I have one physician who’s for sure willing to provide abortions and comply with S.B. 8,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health. “But the rest of my 16 physicians are still trying to figure out where their risks stop and start, and if they’re willing to provide.”

There is a lawsuit against the “heartbeat” law, but I presume there won’t be any action on it until right around September 1, when the law begins to take effect. There’s also no particular reason to believe that the law will get put on hold, given the nature of the Fifth Circuit. We could moot laws like this via federal legislation, but if we can’t get a voting rights bill passed due to the filibuster, then there’s no reason to think other things that are not able to be shoved through the reconciliation process will get passed, either. I do believe that at some point there will be a way to go on offense against this sort of atrocity, but I don’t know when that may happen. In the meantime, it’s the same prescription as it’s ever been: We need to win more elections, and now that laws like this are in place that bar is even higher, because now we have to repeal existing laws and not just block new ones. It’s a crap job, but we have no other choice.

It’s a bad time to go to a rural hospital

Aug 15th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Only gonna get worse, too, at least in the short term.

For the past week, Brooke Hale has been told “no” about 80 times a day. The executive assistant at Altus Lumberton Hospital has spent her shifts on the phone in a windowless office, repeatedly asking other facilities within an 800-mile radius the same question: Can you take one of our critical COVID-19 patients?

On Thursday, there were three. They needed intensive care, and without it they could die. Hale tried hospitals in Texarkana and Tyler, Lubbock and Lufkin, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi. None had room.

“I feel helpless,” Hale said through her green N95 mask. “I feel like I can’t help patients like I need to.”

The same scene is being repeated throughout Southeast Texas, as rural hospitals and freestanding emergency rooms are scrambling to send critical patients to other regions and states because Houston medical centers, full with COVID-19 patients, refuse to accept transfers.

For small facilities, what once was a routine transport to local hospitals has become a frantic process of cold calling and cajoling health care providers in hopes of securing an open bed. In the meantime, patients who must receive intensive care languish in places that are unable to provide it.

By Thursday afternoon, 543 patients in the 25-county hospital region anchored by Houston were waiting for staffed hospital beds, according to the SouthEast Texas Regional Advisory Council; 62 more waited to be admitted to an ICU. The gridlock also extends to ambulance crews, who wait longer outside of crowded ERs to admit patients.

And health officials predict the region’s COVID-19 hospitalizations, which have grown for three straight weeks to more than 2,500, will swell further through August.

The result is a strained health care system that is more dangerous for anyone in need of acute care, from a critically ill COVID-19 patient to a car accident victim who requires surgery. And like last summer’s surge, researchers fear this wave will bring an increase in non-COVID deaths, attributable to delays in care caused by the pandemic.

“Typically, it takes less than an hour to find a bed,” said Dr. Swapan Dubey, chief medical officer at Texas Emergency Care Center, which has two Houston-area freestanding ERs. “Nowadays in my own centers, we’re hearing cases that are taking 30 to even 50 hours.”

I mean, this is the same song we’ve been singing for the past few weeks. We experienced this before, in previous COVID waves, and at least at some level the lesson never took, because here we are again. We know exactly what we need to do to make this better, and we have a much better tool available to us this time with the vaccines, and yet here we are again. I don’t know what else to say, but I do know who to blame, and that’s Greg Abbott. Even in this part of the state, which includes some of the reddest counties around, we need to make more people see it that way, too.

Census data is out

Aug 14th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Get ready, there’s about to be a whole lot more legislative activity.

Setting the stage for what is expected to be a bruising battle over political representation, the results of the 2020 census released Thursday showed that Texas’ explosive growth over the past decade was again powered by people of color.

And it is the state’s cities and suburbs that are booming, with Texas home to three of the country’s 10 largest cities and four of the fastest-growing.

Texas gained the most residents of any state since 2010, and its Hispanic population is now nearly as large as the non-Hispanic white population, with just half a percentage point separating them. Texas gained nearly 11 Hispanic residents for every additional white resident since 2010.

Texans of color accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth. The 2020 census puts the state’s population at 29,145,505 — a 16% jump from 25.1 million in 2010. Hispanic Texans were responsible for half of that increase.

Non-Hispanic white Texans now make up just 39.8% of the state’s population — down from 45% in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of Hispanic Texans has grown to 39.3%.

The Hispanic population’s approach to becoming Texas’ largest demographic group marks a significant milestone ahead of this year’s redistricting, during which state lawmakers will draw new political maps divvying up seats in Congress and the state House and Senate in what will no doubt be an intense and protracted fight over political control of the state for the next decade.

Texas Republicans hold every lever of power to try to lock in or even expand their majorities at the state Capitol and in Congress. But they will be working to redraw the state’s political maps while confronting the demographic reality that the state is growing in ways that put the party’s stranglehold in question.

[…]

The state’s growth has been concentrated in diverse urban centers that serve as Democratic strongholds and suburban communities, several of which have either already turned blue or are trending in that direction. Since 2010, 44% of the state’s growth took place in its five largest counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis. All 10 of the state’s fastest-growing counties in the last decade were suburban.

Hays County — between Austin and San Antonio — experienced the most growth, doubling its population in the last decade.

You can click over and look at the charts and the interactive map, but the key to all this is the growth in the cities and suburbs, which have been the drivers of Democratic strength as well. I have no doubt the Republicans will have some tricks up their sleeves, but this is the big challenge for them. Remember, even as 2020 is cast as a Democratic failure for not gaining more seats, the map went from 95-55 in 2012, with a lot of stability over the first three elections of the decade, to a big shift in 2018 and a realistic vision of Democratic control, even if that turned out to be illusory.

I’ve said before, I don’t know yet what the Republicans’ risk appetite will be. The more they are comfortable with drawing themselves 53-47 districts instead of 60-40 districts, the more seats they can draw for themselves. The downside to that strategy is obvious, but that’s the decision they have to make.

Meanwhile, Houston did some growing this past decade as well.

Houston’s population grew nearly 10 percent in the last decade, fueled by large gains in the number of Latino and Asian residents that will shape the political future of Texas for years to come.

With 2,304,580 residents as of April 1, 2020, Houston remains the fourth-largest city, still lagging behind Chicago’s 2,746,388, according to 2020 census data released Thursday after a grueling, unprecedented effort to collect comprehensive data on the nation’s population in the midst of a global pandemic.

Houston’s 9.8 percent growth rate from 2,099,451 residents in 2010, however, was only second only to Phoenix’s 11.2 percent among the top 10 largest cities in the U.S. The Bayou City was also second in terms of raw population growth, adding 205,129 residents in the last decade. Only New York City ranked higher, adding 629,057 people.

One of the only areas in the region that shrank was the white population. Notably, Houston’s white population fell about 30 percent in the last decade, from 1,060,492 people in 2010 to 739,873 in 2020. The decline was smaller —5 percent — in Harris County as a whole.

“There’s a net out-migration of non-Hispanic whites from urban cores like Houston and Dallas and moving out into suburban rings, and at the same time you have this international migration occurring, and a lot of that is going to be people who are Hispanic and also Asian,” Texas Demographer Lloyd Potter said.

The story didn’t cite numbers for Harris County, but the map in that Trib piece tells me that it increased by 15.6%, from just under 4.1 million to over 4.7 million. Among other things, we will see if Harris County gets its 25th legislative seat back. We will have some answers soon:

T-minus 18 days and counting. The San Antonio Report has more.

Fort Bend joins the lawsuit parade

Aug 12th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Come on in, the water’s fine.

As the Delta variant drives a pandemic surge, Fort Bend County officials on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning local government from implementing public health mandates.

“I’ll do all I can to protect the public health, and the people of Fort Bend County,” Judge KP George tweeted. “I hope others will join me in following the science and listening to local doctors and the CDC to act swiftly and decisively.”

The county filed a lawsuit in district court requesting a temporary restraining order to challenge the Republican governor’s order. George, a Democrat, and other county leaders had scheduled a news conference for Wednesday afternoon.

County commissioners met in a closed special session at 3 p.m. Wednesday to deliberate with an attorney and discuss potential responses to rising COVID-19 infections, according to the meeting agenda.

The story has no further detail, so I will just assume this is along similar lines as the others so far.

We now have our first official response from the powers that be, and as one might expect, it’s arrogant and jerky.

Attorney General Ken Paxton said Wednesday he plans to appeal a pair of rulings by judges in Dallas and San Antonio that allow local officials in those cities to issue mask mandates, with possible decisions from the Texas Supreme Court by the end of the week.

The temporary rulings override Gov. Greg Abbott’s May executive order that bars local officials from requiring face coverings. They came in response to legal challenges from top elected officials in the Dallas and San Antonio areas, who argued Abbott overstepped his emergency powers by preventing the local mandates. The rulings also pointed to a rapid ongoing rise in COVID hospitalizations across the state, particularly in large cities.

Paxton said Wednesday he expects a quick ruling in his favor from the state’s top civil court.

“I’m hopeful by the end of the week or at least early next week we’ll have a response from the Texas Supreme Court,” Paxton told conservative radio host Dana Loesch. “I’m going to tell you right now, I’m pretty confident we’re going to win that.”

[…]

Paxton argued on the talk show Wednesday that the Texas Legislature had granted Abbott the power to ban local COVID restrictions, including mask mandates, through the sweeping Texas Disaster Act of 1975. He also downplayed the early court win by Jenkins.

“The reality is, he’s going to lose,” Paxton said. “He may get a liberal judge in Dallas County to rule in his favor, but ultimately I think we have a Texas Supreme Court that will follow the law. They have in the past.”

We’ll see about that. For what it’s worth, there was one Republican district court judge in Fort Bend who wasn’t challenged in 2018, so there’s at least a chance that he could preside over this case. The crux of the argument here is that it’s Greg Abbott who isn’t following the law. I agree with Paxton that the Supreme Court is going to be very inclined to see it Abbott’s way, but I’d like to think they’ll at least take the plaintiffs’ arguments into account.

Later in the day, we got the first words from Abbott as well.

“The rebellion is spreading across the state,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.

Abbott — under intense pressure from some on his right to hold the line against local officials who want to require masks — now is trying to quell that rebellion.

Hours after Jenkins signed his mandate, Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton announced they would go to court to block Dallas County’s top official — asking the 5th Court of Appeals to overturn the state district judge’s decision that allowed Jenkins to move forward. The two men threatened to sue any government official who defies Abbott’s order.

“The path forward relies on personal responsibility — not government mandates,” Abbott said in a statement.

Yeah, that’s what has gotten us to this situation in the first place. I will confess that I’m surprised it has taken this long for Abbott to speak up. He’s never been shy about quashing dissent, and as this story notes the right wing scream machine has been fulminating about his lack of action. Those days are clearly now over.

We got another peek at the state’s response in this story about the larger revolt by cities and school districts against Abbott’s mask mandate ban.

At a hearing Tuesday afternoon before state District Judge Antonia “Toni” Arteaga, a city attorney argued that Abbott had exceeded the bounds of the Texas Disaster Act of 1975, which the governor cited in suspending local authority to impose COVID restrictions.

“The Texas Legislature has given cities and counties broad authority within the Texas Health and Safety Act,” said Assistant City Attorney Bill Christian. “Only the Legislature has the authority to suspend laws.”

Kimberly Gdula, a lawyer with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, pointed to an appellate court ruling last November that upheld Abbott’s ban on local business restrictions. She also argued that the city and county were asking the court to improperly “throw out” parts of the Disaster Act.

Interesting, but I don’t know how to evaluate it. When there are some actual opinions and not just temporary restraining orders pending the injunction hearings, we’ll know more.

It’s possible there may be another avenue to explore in all this.

President Joe Biden says the White House is “checking” on whether he has the power to intervene in states like Texas where Republican leaders have banned mask mandates.

Asked whether he has the power to step in, Biden responded: “I don’t believe that I do thus far. We’re checking that.”

“I think that people should understand, seeing little kids — I mean, four, five, six years old — in hospitals, on ventilators, and some of them passing — not many, but some of them passing — it’s almost, I mean, it’s just — well, I should not characterize beyond that,” Biden said.

[…]

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday the administration is “looking into ways we can help the leaders at the local level who are putting public health first continue to do their jobs.” She said those include efforts to “keep students safe and keep students in school” and that the U.S. Department of Education “and others” are working on it.

Insert shrug emoji here. I don’t know what this might look like, but I believe they will be creative in looking for a possible point of leverage.

Finally, on a side note, Fort Worth ISD implemented a mask mandate on Tuesday. We are still waiting for HISD to vote on the request by Superintendent Millard House to implement one for our district. The Board meeting is today, I expect this to be done with little fuss from the trustees.

Abbott flails about on the COVID surge

Aug 12th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

He remains committed to the bit.

Gov. Greg Abbott announced new moves Monday to fight the coronavirus pandemic as it rages again in Texas, including asking hospitals to again put off certain elective procedures to free up space for COVID-19 patients.

Still, the governor did not back down on his refusal to institute any new statewide restrictions on businesses or to let local governments and schools mandate masks or vaccines.

Instead, Abbott announced he had written to the Texas Hospital Association asking hospitals to “voluntarily postpone medical procedures for which delay will not result in loss of life or a deterioration in the patient’s condition.” As coronavirus was consuming the state last summer, Abbott took a more restrictive approach and banned elective surgeries in over 100 counties before ending the prohibition in September.

Abbott also announced Monday he was asking state agencies to open additional COVID-19 antibody infusion centers that aim to treat COVID-19 patients with therapeutic drugs and keep them from requiring hospitalization. And he said the Department of State Health Services “will be utilizing staffing agencies to provide medical personnel from out-of-state to Texas health care facilities to assist in COVID-19 operations.”

That is a reversal for the state. In July, the state told cities and counties it would not send additional health care workers to aid hospitals with the latest surge of COVID-19 patients, like it had earlier in the pandemic. Instead, state officials said, city and county leaders should dip into $10.5 billion worth of federal stimulus dollars to pay for those workers should hospitals need them.

[…]

As part of Monday’s announcement, Abbott’s office said he was directing state agencies to “increase vaccination availability across the state” but did not provide further details.

“Texans can help bolster our efforts by getting vaccinated against COVID-19,” Abbott said in the news release. “The COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective, and it is our best defense against this virus.”

Well, some hospitals had already taken the step of halting elective procedures, so way to be out in front on that, bro. Part of this “plan” includes recruiting more nurses from out of state to help us with the shortage we are now experiencing. I presume this means he’ll be trying to lure them from states that have COVID under a greater degree of control, probably places where the Governors in question made an actual effort to get people vaccinated and didn’t kneecap local leaders’ attempts to keep their people safe. I have no idea why any of them would want to come here now, but God bless ’em if they do. I guess we should be thankful that Abbott is doing something other than literally fiddling while the state burns, but color me a little too grumpy to care about such crumbs.

Overflow COVID tents

Aug 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

This is fine.

Harris Health System’s intensive care units are nearly full as the delta variant sends more COVID-19 patients into hospitals, prompting the safety-net health system for the county’s indigent communities to construct tents for triaging patients.

As of Monday afternoon, Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital’s ICU was 100 percent full, and 63 percent of patients were being treated for COVID-19 complications. Ben Taub Hospital’s ICU was 95 percent full, with 27 percent of patients sickened by the virus.

“The trend line is vertical,” said Bryan McLeod, a spokesperson for Harris Health.

The tents apparent outside the hospital in northeast Houston could be used for COVID-19 overflow patients, but officials may also choose to use it for patients who come in with other illnesses. Last summer, they were used to diagnose coronavirus cases, McLeod said.

This year, they may just be used to treat non-COVID patients, or those with less severe infections. Staff are still installing operational and diagnostic equipment in the overflow area, which will take patients from the emergency room.

While LBJ is the only hospital currently using such tents, Memorial Hermann is creating additional space for overflow patients by converting beds in their pre- and post-anesthesia units into ICU beds.

[…]

Statewide, hospitalizations have been increasing rapidly; on Saturday 9,462 people were hospitalized, an increase of 30 percent over the previous Saturday, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. This weekend’s hospitalization figures were the highest Texas has seen since Feb. 6.

Not just in Houston.

Dozens of Texas hospitals have run out of intensive care unit beds as COVID-19 surges faster than any other time during the pandemic, propelled by the new delta variant.

The state is divided into 22 trauma service areas, and half of them reported 10 or fewer available ICU beds on Sunday. As more than 9,400 COVID-19 patients fill the state’s ICUs, which are reserved for the patients who are the sickest or most injured, the trauma service area that includes Laredo reported no available ICU beds, while the area that includes Abilene reported having one.

At least 53 Texas hospitals have no available ICU capacity, according to numbers reported to the federal government during the week ending Aug. 5. In Austin, five hospitals were at or above 90% of their ICU capacity during the same period, with two reporting no available ICU beds.

“This surge is by far the fastest and most aggressive that we’ve seen. Almost all of our hospitalizations are due to unvaccinated patients developing severe illness,” Dr. Desmar Walkes, Austin-Travis County’s health authority, told reporters last week. “ICU staff are seeing a younger population in our hospitals. Patients in the ICU are sicker and stay in the hospital longer than with prior surges, putting more strain on hospital resources.”

Around 87.1% of all hospital beds in Texas are in use — the highest level since the start of the pandemic — with 14.1% of those beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. When Gov. Greg Abbott began to relax some COVID-19 restrictions on businesses in October, his order maintained reduced restaurant capacity and kept bars closed in regions in which 15% or more of hospital beds were filled with COVID-19 patients.

This week, COVID-19 hospitalizations reached higher levels across the state than when Abbott imposed a statewide mask mandate in July 2020. Abbott has maintained that he will not be reviving the mask mandate and has barred local authorities from issuing their own.

No, really, NBD.

More than 10,000 Texans are hospitalized for COVID-19, according to data released by the Texas Department of State Health Services Tuesday afternoon.

According to Tuesday’s report, 10,041 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 across the state of Texas on Monday, the highest rate since Feb. 4, as the delta variant continues to dominate new COVID-19 infections.

[…]

Monday’s figure represents a 37 percent increase over the number of hospitalizations one week prior.

But don’t worry, Abbott has asked for more nurses to move to Texas, so we’re going to be fine. Really, what more do you need him to do?

A timeline of the blackout

Aug 9th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Of interest.

A new report from University of Texas at Austin energy experts lays much of the blame for power outages during the state’s deadly February freeze on the failure of natural gas producers to fully weatherize their facilities.”

The natural gas system could not meet demand,” the authors of the 101-page study wrote. “The production losses stemmed principally from freeze-offs, icy roads and electric outages to the equipment used in the natural gas industry.”

UT issued the study Tuesday, the same day the state’s health department revised its official death toll from the disaster, raising it to 210 from 151. However, at least one data-driven report suggests the actual number may exceed 700.

[…]

For the study, UT researchers looked at the performance of 27 natural gas facilities during the freeze and found that as temperatures dropped, the operators’ pipelines and equipment ceased to function, resulting in an 85% falloff when power companies needed the fuel.

Indeed, 18 of the natural gas facilities it studied had “zero output” on February 17, the peak of the storm.

In addition to their human cost, the failures resulted in massive charges for the state’s power generators, according to the report. CPS Energy, for example, tallied losses on natural gas fuel purchases of as much as $850 million, and losses on purchased power costs of as much as $250 million.

The 101 page report is here. Neither of us is likely to read through the whole thing, but the Findings section of the Executive Summary give you the main points:

The failure of the electricity and natural gas systems serving Texas before and during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 had no single cause. While the 2021 storm did not set records for the lowest recorded temperatures in many parts of the state, it caused generation outages and a loss of electricity service to Texas customers several times more severe than winter events leading to electric service disruptions in December 1989 and February 2011. The 2021 event exceeded prior events with respect to both the number and capacity of generation unit outages, the maximum load shed (power demand reduction) and number of customers affected, the lowest experienced grid frequency (indicating a high level of grid instability), the amount of natural gas generation experiencing fuel shortages, and the duration of electric grid operations under emergency conditions associated with load shed and blackout for customers. The financial ramifications of the 2021 event are in the billions of dollars, likely orders of magnitude larger than the financial impacts of the 1989 and 2011 blackouts.

Factors contributing to the electricity blackouts of February 15-18, 2021, include the following:

  • All types of generation technologies failed. All types of power plants were impacted by the winter storm. Certain power plants within each category of technologies (natural gas-fired power plants, coal power plants, nuclear reactors, wind generation, and solar generation facilities) failed to operate at their expected electricity generation output levels.
  • Demand forecasts for severe winter storms were too low. ERCOT’s most extreme winter scenario underestimated demand relative to what actually happened by about 9,600 MW, about 14%.
  • Weather forecasts failed to appreciate the severity of the storm. Weather models were unable to accurately forecast the timing (within one to two days) and severity of extreme cold weather, including that from a polar vortex.
  • Planned generator outages were high, but not much higher than assumed in planning scenarios. Total planned outage capacity was about 4,930 MW, or about 900 MW higher than in ERCOT’s “Forecasted Season Peak Load” scenario.
  • Grid conditions deteriorated rapidly early in February 15 leading to blackouts. So much power plant capacity was lost relative to the record electricity demand that ERCOT was forced to shed load to avoid a catastrophic failure. From noon on February 14 to noon on February 15, the amount of offline wind capacity increased from 14,600 MW to 18,300 MW (+3,700 MW).2 Offline natural gas capacity increased from 12,000 MW to 25,000 MW (+13,000 MW). Offline coal capacity increased from 1,500 MW to 4,500 MW (+3,000 MW). Offline nuclear capacity increased from 0 MW to 1,300 MW, and offline solar capacity increased from 500 MW to 1100 MW (+600 MW), for a total loss of 24,600 MW in a single 24-hour period.
  • Power plants listed a wide variety of reasons for going offline throughout the event. 3 Reasons for power plant failures include “weather-related” issues (30,000 MW, ~167 units), “equipment issues” (5,600 MW, 146 units), “fuel limitations” (6,700 MW, 131 units), “transmission and substation outages” (1,900 MW, 18 units), and “frequency issues” (1,800 MW, 8 units). 4
  • Some power generators were inadequately weatherized; they reported a level of winter preparedness that turned out to be inadequate to the actual conditions experienced. The outage, or derating, of several power plants occurred at temperatures above their stated minimum temperature ratings.
  • Failures within the natural gas system exacerbated electricity problems. Natural gas production, storage, and distribution facilities failed to provide the full amount of fuel demanded by natural gas power plants. Failures included direct freezing of natural gas equipment and failing to inform their electric utilities of critical electrically-driven components. Dry gas production dropped 85% from early February to February 16, with up to 2/3 of processing plants in the Permian Basin experiencing an outage.5
  • Failures within the natural gas system began prior to electrical outages. Days before ERCOT called for blackouts, natural gas was already being curtailed to some natural gas consumers, including power plants.
  • Some critical natural gas infrastructure was enrolled in ERCOT’s emergency response program. Data from market participants indicates that 67 locations (meters) were in both the generator fuel supply chain and enrolled in ERCOT’s voluntary Emergency Response Service program (ERS), which would have cut power to them when those programs were called upon on February 15. At least five locations that later identified themselves to the electric utility as critical natural gas infrastructure were enrolled in the ERS program.
  • Natural gas in storage was limited. Underground natural gas storage facilities were operating at maximum withdrawal rates and reached unprecedently-low levels of working gas, indicating that the storage system was pushed to its maximum capability.

The ERCOT system operator managed to avoid a catastrophic failure of the electric grid despite the loss of almost half of its generation capacity, including some black start units that would have been needed to jump-start the grid had it gone into a complete collapse.

Just as a reminder, the grid was not on the first special session agenda, and as of today isn’t on the second session’s agenda. I have heard it suggested that Abbott could add grid items to the agenda, or put them on but near the bottom of the agenda for this special session, to make it harder for the Dems to be away. The main problem with that analysis is that Abbott has been busy telling everyone in sight that the grid has been totally fixed. What’s to put on the agenda if that’s really the case? His problem for now, all of ours the next time the words “rolling blackouts” get mentioned.

There needs to be more defiance of Greg Abbott and his no-mandates mandate

Aug 8th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
20 comments

I find a bit of a pattern in this story and wonder if there may be something to it.

School districts, local officials and hospitals are pushing back on Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order barring mask and vaccine mandates, setting the stage for legal showdowns over coronavirus safety measures just as cases are surging in Texas and hospitals are filling up.

Houston ISD signaled its intention to require face coverings when students return this month. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston requested an exemption to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for staff, but was denied. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins required face masks at a meeting this week; he’s now being sued.

[…]

Dr. Mark McClellan, who advised Abbott earlier in the pandemic, said local officials need flexibility based on conditions in their area.

“There is evidence that wearing a mask, especially at times of high community transmission which Texas has right now, does help significantly,” said McClellan, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University.

“I appreciate that wearing a mask is inconvenient, I would rather not do it,” he said. “But if there are high rates of transmission in the community I think it’s important for local authorities to have the ability to make a decision that works best for their students and their population.”

Early last year, Abbott said he would rely on data and doctors in making decisions to promote public health. McClellan was one of Abbott’s four original medical advisors, but is no longer playing that role.

Abbott has remained in regular contact with one of the original advisors, Department of State Health Services head Dr. John Hellerstedt, since the beginning of the pandemic, according to spokeswoman Renae Eze. Hellerstedt did not answer questions about whether he agreed with Abbott’s executive order.

[…]

It remains to be seen whether other school districts follow suit in defying Abbott’s order. El Paso officials wrote to Abbott this week urging him to give school districts a choice in whether to require masks or not. Dallas ISD did not respond to a request for comment.

Violations of Abbott’s order can result in a fine of up to $1,000. Georgina Pérez, a State Board of Education member from El Paso, volunteered to raise money to help pay fines for school districts that defy the governor’s order by mandating masks.

“Knowingly not protecting children from harm goes against everything that teachers stand for,” she said.

Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to questions about whether any fines have been levied to date. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has faced no pushback since he told the city’s roughly 20,000 workers on Monday to resume wearing masks at work, according to a spokesperson.

[…]

Some institutions that sought exemptions from Abbott’s order have been rejected. The latest version blocks a wide swath of government entities, including cities, counties, universities and publicly funded hospitals, from requiring staff get the vaccine while full FDA approval is pending.

The University of Texas Medical Branch would want to require vaccination of its frontline clinical staff and requested an exemption, but was told to abide by the governor’s order, according to Dr. Janak A. Patel, director of the Department of Infection Control & Healthcare Epidemiology.

Dr. John Zerwas, the UT system’s vice chancellor for health affairs, raised the exemption request with Abbott recently, who was not willing to change his position, he said.

Parkland Hospital, a publicly funded organization that falls under Abbott’s order, plans to require its employees get vaccinated as soon as the FDA fully approves the shot. In anticipation, Parkland alerted staff this week that the first dose will be required by Sept. 24 and the second — or single Johnson & Johnson dose — by Oct. 15. Approximately 71% of staff are already vaccinated against COVID-19.

“These steps are necessary to protect Parkland’s complex patient population who, due to their socio-economic status, often have no choice in where they receive care,” said Michael Malaise, senior vice president of communications and external relations for Parkland, in an email.

The main thing I notice is that for the most part, the entities that have just gone ahead and done the thing they wanted to do that was in violation of Abbott’s executive orders have – so far – not received any pushback for doing so. The exception is Dallas County Commissioners Court, which got a stern letter from Ken Paxton after barring one of the commissioners from entering without a mask, but even that letter didn’t spell out any particular actions Paxton would take. The difference between UT Medical Branch hospital and Parkland Hospital is particularly instructive. Moreover, even if a cease-and-desist letter or some other legal action comes down on Parkland, by the time the dust settles they probably will have gotten some number of previously unvaxxed employees to get their shots, and that’s all that matters.

So, my advice to El Paso ISD and austin ISD, which may be considering its own mask mandate, is to just do it. Mask mandates are something that a lot of parents want, especially parents of medically fragile children or who have immunocompromised family members at home, and especially given the limited remote learning opportunities that exist now. The thousand-dollar fine, which doesn’t appear to have a clear mechanism for enforcement, isn’t very much even if it’s a thousand dollars a day, and that may be challenged in court on the grounds that it is discriminatory against students with health issues. But really, it’s the right thing to do, and maybe – just maybe – Abbott has gotten out a bit over his skis here. For sure, asking is going to get you nowhere. Take action and take it now, if all else fails it should be something that can be taken back. Do what you must to protect the kids.

UPDATE: Someone agrees with me:

Who favors a vaccine mandate?

Aug 6th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

A lot of people, apparently. Don’t expect it to make much difference, though.

Most Texans support measures requiring all eligible people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, according to a recent survey.

More than 65 percent of Texans said they would support vaccine mandates issued by federal, state or local governments; the national average was 64 percent. More than 70 percent of Texans would support vaccine requirements to board an airplane; more than 62 percent would support vaccine mandates for children returning to schools; and 67 percent would support them for students returning to universities.

The findings come as some private businesses begin requiring vaccines, but government leaders have resisted such mandates as they’ve struggled to convince large numbers of Americans to get vaccinated, even as the more contagious delta variant spreads. Less than 53 percent of Texans are fully vaccinated, according to state data.

President Joe Biden last week announced that federal workers will have to sign forms attesting they’ve been vaccinated or else be required to wear masks, take weekly tests and more.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, issued an executive order last week barring local governments from limiting the capacity of restaurants and other businesses or requiring facial coverings, even if they are located in a hospital region with a high level of COVID-19 patients.

Abbott and other Texas Republicans have vocally opposed the idea of mandating vaccines.

The national poll was conducted in June and July by the COVID States Project, a group of researchers at Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University and Northwestern University. It included a survey of 707 Texans and findings in the state carried a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.

The survey found Americans strongly support vaccine mandates, but there big gaps between Democrats and Republicans, and urban and rural residents.

The poll is here, and here’s the description: “Between June 9and July 7,2021, we surveyed 20,669 individuals across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The survey was conducted by PureSpectrum via an online, nonprobability sample, with state-level representative quotas for race/ethnicity, age, and gender (for methodological details on the other waves, see covidstates.org). In addition to balancing on these dimensions, we reweighted our data using demographic characteristics to match the U.S. population with respect to race/ethnicity, age, gender, education, and living in urban, suburban, or rural areas. This was the latest in a series of surveys we have been conducting since April 2020, examining attitudes and behaviors regarding COVID-19 in the United States.” In other words, a poll of adults, not registered voters, which tends to produce results more favorable to my preferred position. There was greater support, overall and in Texas, for requiring a vaccine to get on a plane, and varying levels for requiring a vaccine to go to school or college.

Like I said, I don’t know how much difference this makes. There are mandates of varying aggressiveness going out now for federal employees, some big private companies like WalMart and Disney, and some hospital systems here in Houston. I think a mandate for getting on an airplane is doable, and I hope that happens in the next week or so. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. It’s incredibly crappy that our malevolent governor refuses to let local governments mandate it for their employees, but maybe more private companies will step up. And hopefully soon we’ll get the final FDA approval, as well as initial approval for kids under the age of 12. Vax numbers are trending up a bit nationally now, especially in the hardest-hit states as some of the holdouts there are starting to get the message. It’s not fast enough and of course we never should have been in this position in the first place, but it’s better than what had been happening before. It’s going to be a rough month or two, so hold on and stay safe. Vox has more.

The data for the “fourth wave” looks so, so bad

Aug 5th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
18 comments

Yikes.

Fueled by the delta variant, a surge in Houston COVID-19 hospitalizations is growing as fast as at any time during the pandemic so far, and is projected to pass previous records by mid-August — even though roughly half of all eligible Houstonians are fully vaccinated.

“We’re heading into dark times,” said Texas Medical Center CEO Bill McKeon. Already, he said, “our ICUs are filled with unvaccinated people.”

On Tuesday, Texas Medical Center hospitals listed 1,372 people in intensive care — more than the number of regular ICU beds. The hospitals are now in Phase II of the medical center’s surge plan, opening unused wards to accommodate the gravely ill patients expected to need them.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported 7,305 people were hospitalized statewide for COVID-19 as of Tuesday — more than four times as many as on July 1, and a 38 percent increase over last Tuesday’s figure.

Estimates by the UT-Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium suggest that all regions across Texas will face surges larger than anything seen so far.

In the Houston area, the previous record for COVID hospitalizations was 2,927 people on Jan. 8. The consortium’s latest model predicts that record will be broken Aug. 8. The previous record for ICU patients — 947, set July 18, 2020 — is predicted to be broken Aug. 15.

Even more alarmingly, the surge isn’t predicted to level off there, but to keep climbing sharply. By the end of August, the consortium forecasts that roughly 2,000 people will be in Houston ICUs — double the previous high.

“It’s really scary,” said Spencer Fox, associate director of the modeling project. “I’m worried about the next few weeks. It’s so clear in the data: We’re in the midst of a very severe surge.”

Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom described “a perfect storm”: the combination of Texas’ large number of unvaccinated people, the rampaging delta variant, and the recent relaxation of preventive measures such as masking and social distancing.

I’m at a loss for words and have wrung out just about all of my outrage. So I’m just going to leave this here:

If only Greg Abbott would listen to his own Department of State Health Services. I wonder what it’s like to live in a state that has a Governor that isn’t actively trying to harm its residents.

One more thing:

White Linen Night is back — well, sort of.

In lieu of official festivities, a group of Heights business owners have gotten together to host “Late Night on 19th Street” this Saturday. The good news is there will still be plenty of live music, pop-up vendors, artisans and white linen. The bad news is there will not be street closures, so plan accordingly.

Celebrations — geared toward supporting small, local businesses — are slated to run Aug. 7 from 5-7 p.m. between the 200-300 on Heights’ historic 19th Street.

Manready Mercantile owner Travis Weaver suggests bringing water, sunscreen, a bandana, portable cooler and potentially an umbrella.

“It never hurts to be prepared,” he said via statement. “If you don’t have any white linen, anything white will do. Don’t forget comfy shoes!”

How about “And don’t forget a mask! And for Christ’s sake don’t bother to show up if you and your entire party aren’t fully vaccinated!” I’m just saying.

Our eroding reputation as a good place to do business

Aug 5th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

If we don’t have that, what do we have?

Veteran Waco economist Ray Perryman is used to seeing an annual parade of best for business rankings that put Texas at the top.

Those rankings shape perceptions about the state’s business climate — a longtime selling point touted by politicians and economic development specialists alike.

That’s why Perryman finds one recent ranking “eerily disturbing.”

Texas fell to fourth in business news network CNBC’s annual ranking of best states for business, dropping two spots from its 2019 ranking. Virginia, North Carolina and Utah beat out Texas. The network didn’t do a 2020 ranking because of the pandemic.

So what led to Texas’ decline?

Look no further than the Lone Star State’s 49th place finish — ahead of only Arizona — in CNBC’s expanded category called life, health and inclusion. This year, that category included inclusiveness initiatives, health care resources, progress in ending the pandemic and other more traditional quality-of-life measures.

“This ranking is a compelling early warning signal that short-sighted, counterproductive policies risk eroding the progress over the past 30 plus years in building Texas to be the most competitive economy in the country,” said Perryman, president and chief executive officer of The Perryman Group. His firm produces economic estimates of everything from Texas’ epic winter storm to the consequences of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 athletic conference.

“It’s an unforced error that the state can ill afford,” he wrote in his weekly column published on his website. The column was titled “This Stuff Matters!”

That column is here. As noted, Perryman is the go-to guy for timely economic projections on a variety of subjects. He’s also been a consistent critic of things like our chronic underfunding of education and more recently the various forms of anti-transgender bills, so in a sense this is confirmation of his priors. It also makes sense, especially at a time where it’s cities and diversifying suburbs that are the biggest components of Texas’ economic engine and yet also a constant target of the state government. It’s not crazy to imagine that more people who might otherwise seek high-paying jobs here will be turned off by what Greg Abbott et al are doing. As with polls, this is one data point and you shouldn’t go overboard with it, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

The march for voting rights

Aug 2nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
19 comments

Good work, but it can’t be the end.

Saturday marked the third time in as many months that former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke has headlined a voting rights rally at the Texas Capitol, as Democrats hope to keep momentum with just a week left before the end of the special session in Austin.

The rally, which drew several thousand attendees, marked the end of a Selma-style march to the state Capitol — a roughly 27-mile journey from Georgetown to Austin that activists split over four days. It was organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a group inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.

As demonstrators finished the last leg of their march, they greeted a crowd in front of the Capitol holding signs: “Texas deserves better,” “It’s about us,” “We care, we vote.” They sang along with the performers on the center stage as they belted out the labor movement anthem, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

“The right time to do right is right now,” the Rev. William J. Barber II, a national civil rights leader who spearheaded the march, repeated throughout the rally.

It culminated with a live performance by Willie Nelson, who sang the classics “Whiskey River” and “Good Hearted Woman.” His set ended with a newer song, “Vote ‘Em Out,” which opens with the line: “If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ‘em out; that’s what Election Day is all about.”

The marchers have demands ranging from a $15 minimum wage to immigration reform, but their most pressing concern is new voting restrictions that have been proposed or passed in GOP-led states. Texas, which already has some of the nation’s strictest laws on voter registration and mail ballots, is among them.

Lots of positive energy came out of this, and I hope it helps to sustain us through the next few weeks, which are going to be tough. But really, what I want to see next are headlines that say things like “Senate Democrats agree to pass voting rights bill that includes redistricting reform and new preclearance requirements”, and “Beto O’Rourke announces his entry into the Texas Governor’s race”. I’m not asking for much here.

We’re #2!

Aug 1st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
13 comments

More people have died of COVID in Texas than any other state except California, as Texas surpasses New York’s total.

Texas has passed New York to become the state with the second-most COVID-19 deaths, a feat experts say was driven by an inability to control transmission of the virus here.

Texas reached the milestone Wednesday, hitting 53,275 deaths, despite trailing New York by more than 29,000 fatalities last summer. Since then, though Texas is 54 percent more populous, more than twice as many Texans as New Yorkers have succumbed to COVID-19. California, the most populous state, leads the nation with 64,372 virus deaths.

Spencer Fox, associate director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, said he was surprised Texas had not passed New York in mortality sooner, since the northeastern state did a far better job limiting the spread of virus after it endured a horrific surge last spring.

“They enacted really strong, precautionary measures that overall are well based in the available science,” Fox said. “It seems that many of the Texas policies were put in place to try and prevent health care collapse rather than trying to prevent transmission.”

By June 30 of last year, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the United States, New York tallied 31,775 virus deaths. Texas had just 2,481.

While New York City hospitals were pushed to the brink in the spring and the region became a global epicenter of the virus, Texas had kept the virus at bay and begun to ease restrictions.

Over next 13 months, however, the states reversed roles. New York kept restrictions and mask rules in place longer and consistently maintained a lower positivity rate than Texas. In contrast, Texas endured two surges of the virus and is in the early stages of a third, as the Delta variant now sweeps the country as a fourth wave of the virus.

During that time, Texas steadily closed in on New York’s death tally, a Chronicle analysis found.

Another way to put it is this: Since June 30 of last year, 13 months ago, there have been about 51,000 COVID deaths in Texas. (That’s the official count, which as we know is too low for a variety of factors, but it’s what we’re using for comparison purposes.) In that same time period, there have been about 22,000 COVID deaths in New York. Texas, with 54% more people than New York, has had 131% more COVID deaths than New York in that time period. It’s mind-boggling, enraging, tragic, devastating, and all of it can be laid at the doorstep of Greg Abbott.

The rest of the story is a timeline of those past 13 months, the various things that governments in New York and Texas did and didn’t do to deal with the changing infection rates, and so on. New York has been far more restrictive than Texas has, sometimes to the point where its residents complained and experts questioned the risk calculation involved, but the numbers are what they are. New York also has a higher vaccination rate than Texas, so this trend is going to continue, and probably accelerate, in the foreseeable future. Indeed, given how much more vaccinated California is than Texas, we could conceivably catch up to them as well. Not a goal we should want to achieve.

But we’re well on the way, and Texas’ hospitals are bracing for impact.

When Terry Scoggin left work at Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant on Tuesday evening, there were five patients at the facility being treated for COVID.

Overnight, six more people suffering severe coronavirus infections were admitted to the rural Northeast Texas hospital — pushing the facility to its capacity limit and putting Scoggin, the hospital’s chief executive, on high alert for what he’s calling “a fourth surge.”

“We’re at it again,” Scoggin said.

That same night, hospitalizations in Bexar County rose by nearly 8%. Almost 100 people were admitted with severe COVID to local facilities on Tuesday alone, Bexar County officials said on Wednesday.

“These numbers are staggering and frightening,” said Eric Epley, CEO of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council for Trauma in San Antonio.

Hospital and health officials across Texas are seeing similar dramatic jumps, straining an already decimated health care system that is starving for workers in the aftermath of previous coronavirus surges.

[…]

Fueled by the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus, which is contributing to skyrocketing cases not just in Texas but across the nation, the rising hospitalizations rates have spread outside of the heavily populated metro areas that first began to report increases a few weeks ago. Now they are being seen in all corners of the state, triggering pleas from hospitals for state-backed staffing help to handle the increasing pressure.

Trend forecasters at the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium said Wednesday that most regions of the state could see a return within a couple of weeks to the capacity-busting hospitalization rate facilities were experiencing in January — the height of the pandemic — if people don’t resume masking up and social distancing.

In Florida, hospitals are already seeing the numbers of COVID patients exceeding levels they saw during the worst of the pandemic, and consortium researchers told The Texas Tribune that Texas is not far behind.

“We are absolutely on a path to hit a surge as large, if not bigger, than the previous surges right now” said Spencer Fox, associate director at the consortium. “If nothing is done, we’re on a crash course for a very large third wave.”

The situation has caused health officials from both rural and metro areas to plead for more resources from the state.

“On behalf of the 157 rural hospitals across Texas, I am writing to ask you immediately take steps to provide additional medical staffing which we anticipate will be needed in our rural hospitals in short order because of the new COVID surge,” John Henderson, president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, wrote in a July 26 letter to Gov. Greg Abbott.

And what was Abbott’s eventual response?

The story is behind their paywall, but the basics of it that I could glean were that the state of Texas is declining to use any COVID stimulus funds to pay for more hospital staff. Instead, the state is directing cities and counties to use their own COVID funds for that. Because we’re all in this together you’re on your own, Jack. And remember, it’s all your fault and will be your fault when more people have died of COVID in Texas than anywhere else in the country.

Greg Abbott will blame you if you get sick

Jul 30th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

He will take no responsibility at all.

With COVID-19 hospitalizations soaring past 5,000 statewide for the first time in nearly five months, state officials are stepping up vaccination outreach programs and promotional campaigns but Gov. Greg Abbott insists that the state won’t impose any new mandates on Texans.

State officials announced Wednesday that Texas has 5,292 people hospitalized with lab-confirmed COVID-19 — the highest number since March 2, the day Abbott announced he was ending all state mask mandates and restrictions on businesses.

At that time, Abbott called for “personal diligence” and said statewide mandates are no longer needed.

Though 10,000 new COVID infections were reported statewide on Wednesday, the most since February, he has not changed his messaging.

“The time for government mask mandates is over — now is the time for personal responsibility,” Abbott wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Every Texan has the right to choose whether they will wear a mask or have their children wear masks.”

His latest comments came as the president of the Texas State Teachers Association publicly called on Abbott to allow schools to require masks, particularly since vaccines have not been approved for children under 12.

“If Gov. Abbott really cares about the health and safety of Texas students, educators and their communities, he will give local school officials and health experts the option of requiring masks in their schools,” Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina said on Tuesday.

I mean, I think we know the answer to that hypothetical.

Meanwhile, statewide hospitalizations from the virus have doubled in the last two weeks and more than tripled since the start of July, when Abbott re-issued a disaster declaration to deal with COVID-19.

“COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising and new variants of the virus are spreading quickly in our communities,” said Dr. John Hellerstedt, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services in a statement Wednesday.

While Texas still appears to have more 9,100 available hospital beds statewide, there are areas around Beaumont, College Station and Killeen reporting that few intensive care beds are available for additional chronic patients.

The College Station region reported no more available ICU beds on Wednesday and Laredo officials were down to just 1 available ICU bed.

Killeen is a city in Bell County, which has one of the worst vaccination rates in the state, according to state data. Just 33.5 percent of that county’s population over 12 years of age have been fully vaccinated compared to over 54 percent in Harris County and 56 percent in Bexar.

“It is clear that increasing vaccinations is still our best strategy to navigate through this pandemic and get to closure,” Bell County Judge David Blackburn said in a recent news release.

Statewide, just 52 percent of Texans 12 and older have been vaccinated.

Here’s the Thursday update.

Across Texas, 5,662 people were hospitalized for the virus as of Thursday, the highest number recorded by DSHS since Feb. 28 and a massive increase since its low point of 1,428 on June 27.

It’s bad, y’all. And it’s getting worse. There’s a bit of a vaccination push now, but as you know it takes time to get fully protected, and we don’t have any. Abbott’s lifting of the mask mandate when he did was premature, and his mulish resistance to any possible leeway for local officials is harmful in the extreme, but let’s be clear that his biggest sin is not doing everything he could to get more Texans vaccinated. Masks at least would do something now, and even if it is too late for this surge to ramp up vaccinations, that’s still by far the best thing to do. So what is Abbott doing?

Vaccinations > masks, but thanks to Abbott’s utter lack of leadership, we have neither. And so thousands more people are getting sick, and some number of them – more than it should be – will end up in the hospital or a grave. And all of that is on Greg Abbott.

On the reaction by some people to the new mask recommendations

Jul 29th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

I have one thing to say to this.

Texas Republicans in Congress are fuming over new mask requirements on Capitol Hill and recommendations from the CDC that even vaccinated Americans begin masking again as an extra precaution in parts of the country where the Delta variant is spreading, including Texas.

“Which is it, vaccines or masks?” said U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a San Antonio Republican, in an impassioned speech on the House floor on Wednesday. “Do the vaccines work or they don’t work? Do the masks work or they don’t work? I’d like to know which it is.”

Health officials have been clear that the vaccines remain effective at preventing the worst outcomes of COVID, including hospitalization and death. The vast majority of breakthrough cases have been mild.

But COVID infections continue to climb throughout much of the U.S. — including Texas — and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week revised its recommendations to urge even fully vaccinated Americans in those areas to wear masks indoors again.

That led to new mask mandates in the U.S. House and the White House, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has made clear he doesn’t not plan to require face coverings again in Texas.

Still, Republicans were outraged at the new guidance. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz called mask-wearing “a virtue signal of submissiveness” as he referred to Democrats wearing face coverings again as “kabuki theater.”

If you are not fully vaccinated, have not made your vaccinated status known to others, and have not been a vocal advocate of vaccination, then you can take any and all complaints you may have about these new recommendations and go fuck yourself. Seriously.

I say again, with all the feeling I can muster: Go fuck yourself.

Still surging

Jul 27th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Hospitalizations.

The number of lab-confirmed COVID hospitalizations in Texas broke 4,000 on Friday for the first time since March, a worrying sign of the pandemic’s quick resurgence since the Delta variant was discovered in the state.

[…]

As of Saturday, Texas Department of State Health Services data reported 4,320 lab-confirmed COVID hospitalizations in the state, more than three times the cases it had at its low of 1,428 less than a month ago. In the span of one week, COVID hospitalizations had spiked nearly 50 percent.

The increases in COVID hospitalizations have been dramatic. In the week ending July 24, Texas averaged 3,710 people hospitalized with COVID, up from 2,537 in the week before and 1,838 in the week before that.

Texas Medical Center hospitals are seeing an influx of COVID patients in ICU beds, and medical leaders may soon consider postponing elective procedures, said Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Everywhere is experiencing that same sort of explosive growth right now, so that’s obviously very concerning,” said McDeavitt, who has been closely tracking local COVID data since the start of the pandemic.

Positive tests.

More than 1,000 people are testing positive per day for COVID-19 in the greater Houston region, more than seven times last month’s daily average, according to the Texas Medical Center.

As the delta variant dominates new COVID-19 infections across the country, the Texas Medical Center is returning to daily coronavirus updates.

The takeaways, sent every morning from William McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center, provide a glimpse into one of the world’s largest medical complexes as its clinicians treat infected patients. Previously released weekly, the switch back to daily missives illustrate how rapidly delta is spreading across the region.

Last week, an average of 1,069 people tested positive per day for COVID-19 in the greater Houston region, more than double the prior week’s daily average.

“The COVID-19 Delta variant is spreading rapidly throughout Texas as only 43 percent of our population is fully vaccinated,” McKeon wrote in a Monday email.

If you don’t know what to do by now, I can’t help you.

It’s not vaccinated people that are dying

Jul 25th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
20 comments

Numbers don’t lie. It’s the unvaccinated that die.

Of the 8,787 people who have died in Texas due to COVID-19 since early February, at least 43 were fully vaccinated, the Texas Department of State Health Services said.

That means 99.5% of people who died due to COVID-19 in Texas from Feb. 8 to July 14 were unvaccinated, while 0.5% were the result of “breakthrough infections,” which DSHS defines as people who contracted the virus two weeks after being fully vaccinated.

The agency said nearly 75% of the 43 vaccinated people who died were fighting a serious underlying condition, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer or chronic lung disease.

Additionally, it said 95% of the 43 vaccinated people who died were 60 or older, and that a majority of them were white and a majority were men.

DSHS noted that these are preliminary numbers, which could change because each case must be confirmed through public health investigations. Statewide, more than 50,000 people have died of COVID-19 since March 2020, but the rate of deaths has slowed dramatically since vaccines became widely available in April.

Dr. David Lakey, the chief medical officer of the University of Texas System, said people succumbing to the coronavirus despite being vaccinated was “not unexpected.”

“No vaccine is 100%,” said Lakey, who is also a member of the Texas Medical Association’s COVID-19 task force. “And we’ve known for a long while that the vaccines aren’t 100%, but they’re really really good at preventing severe disease and hospitalizations. … There will always be some individuals that will succumb to the illness in the absence of full herd immunity.”

He added that 0.5% is “a very low number of individuals in a state of 30 million. … In the grand perspective of everything, that’s not a large number that would call into question at all the use of this vaccine.”

I should note that some of those 43 vaccinated people who died may have had other comorbidities, we don’t have enough data on that. But still, we’re talking a tiny fraction. One out of two hundred. Which group would you rather be in?

Need more? Go look at these charts from the CDC, one of new COVID cases and one of COVID deaths. The spike in new cases is much higher than the increase in deaths, because vaccinated people who still get COVID get a much milder version of it. They don’t go to hospitals, and they don’t die. If more people were vaccinated, that first chart wouldn’t have that big uptick in it, either.

And one more thing:

Just three states are now driving the pandemic in the United States, as the divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated regions of the country becomes ever more stark, as the more transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads.

Forty percent of all new cases this week have been recorded in Florida, Texas and Missouri, White House pandemic response coordinator Jeff Zients revealed at a press briefing Thursday.

Florida alone accounts for 20 percent of all new cases nationally, Zients pointed out, a trend that has stretched into its second week.

Zients added that “virtually all” hospitalizations and deaths — a full 97 percent — are among unvaccinated people. “The threat is now predominantly only to the unvaccinated,” he said. A few vaccinated people do experience so-called breakthrough infections, but they tend to experience only mild COVID-19 illness, or no illness at all.

Encouragingly, Zients said the five states that have experienced the most significant rise in infections — Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Nevada and Missouri — all also saw vaccination rates beat the national average for a second week in a row. But because immunity takes two weeks to develop, and the Delta variant spreads so rapidly, the benefits of the increased uptake of vaccinations may not be evident right away.

Singling out the three states where infections are now spiking could have the effect of putting pressure on elected officials there to do more to encourage vaccinations.

One of those elected officials is Greg Abbott, and we know how much he cares. But maybe some other people are less resistant. The numbers don’t lie.

More masking

Jul 25th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

In Travis County.

Public health officials in Austin and Travis County are now encouraging vaccinated people to wear masks both indoors and outdoors, and for those unvaccinated to stay at home except for essential needs — the first major city in Texas to take such a step.

This comes as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the state, pushing the county’s seven-day average of new hospitalizations to 35 — the threshold for Stage 4 of the area’s COVID-19 risk-based guidelines.

County officials made the announcement in a virtual news conference Friday morning. Under Stage 4, officials want residents — vaccinated and unvaccinated — to wear masks at all times in public, and for unvaccinated people to only leave their homes for essential trips.

The city can’t enforce the restrictions, however, because Gov. Greg Abbott banned all local pandemic-related mandates in May. The recommendations differ from those of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says it safe for people who are fully vaccinated to “resume activities that you did before the pandemic without wearing a mask or physically distancing.”

It was just last week that Austin had gone to Stage 3. Of course as noted they can’t make anyone do any of this. They can just ask nicely and recommend as hard as they can.

Fort Bend is doing likewise.

Fort Bend County officials highly encourage people to wear masks indoors and get vaccinated as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads through the community.

A month after confirming the presence of the Delta variant in Fort Bend, health officials have detected an increase in the COVID-19 test positivity rate and in the number of cases, hospitalizations and ICU admissions, said Dr. Jacquelyn Minter, director of the county’s health and human services department.

In the past week, roughly 77 percent of the reported cases were the Delta variant, Minter said. The vast majority of cases of severe illness involve people who are unvaccinated. There has been a spike in the number of infected young adults.

“We are finding that this variant is especially adept at spreading in close groups of unvaccinated people,” Minter said.

Officials recommend that people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated wear masks indoors, practice physical distancing and wash their hands. County staff will post signs recommending that people mask up.

“This is a preventive action that is being asked,” said County Judge KP George. “This is not a mandate. But it is strongly advised to reduce the number of infected people.”

Harris County has gone up a notch as well, and it won’t surprise me if they take the next step. Just as a reminder, masking and social distancing did a pretty good job of keeping things under control when there was no vaccine. If we could at least do that, we could get this back under control pretty quickly. I think we all know that the overlap between “won’t get vaxxed” and “won’t wear a mask” is pretty high, so keep your expectations in check. If only there were some way to do more than encourage and recommend…

Abbott affirms he will take no action to mitigate future COVID waves

Jul 22nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
38 comments

He’s on brand, that much is for sure.

Gov. Greg Abbott says he will not impose another statewide mask mandate, despite COVID-19 cases being on the rise again.

“There will be no mask mandate imposed, and the reasons for that are very clear,” Abbott told KPRC-TV in Houston on Tuesday. “There are so many people who have immunities to COVID, whether it be through the vaccination, whether it be through their own exposure and their recovery from it, which would be acquired immunity.”

It would be “inappropriate to require people who already have immunity to wear a mask,” Abbott said.

During a news conference Wednesday in Houston, Abbott went further and expressed blanket resistance to any new restrictions to fight the virus. He said Texas is “past the time of government mandates” and “into the time for personal responsibility.”

[…]

Abbott reiterated Tuesday that Texas schoolchildren will not face mask requirements as they return to school later this summer.

“Kids will not be forced by government or by schools to wear masks in school,” Abbott said. “They can by parental choice wear a mask, but there will be no government mandate requiring masks.”

Well, he answered my question, and that answer is “You’re on your own, it’s not my problem if you get sick”. What happens when and if hospitals begin to get overrun remains a mystery. The most charitable explanation of this stance is “Look, we all know that the idiots who haven’t gotten vaccinated are the same idiots who refuse to wear masks, so what’s even the point?” If only he as Governor had some power to enforce compliance, or to be a voice of persuasion to those who have refused to bear any responsibility. But at least he cleared that up for us, so thanks for that. The Chron and Reform Austin have more.

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