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We do need more felony courts

Mar 1st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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This is a good start.

County officials are considering adding new district courts and making more room for detainees in an effort to reduce to county’s court backlog and alleviate overcrowding at the Harris County Jail.

During Commissioners Court on Tuesday, officials considered adding six more district courts to help expedite pending cases in the county’s criminal court system.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo questioned whether focusing directly on the county’s court system would make a significant impact on the jail’s bloated population.

“How do we know that if we bring these new courts that cases will: number one, move faster, and number two, that the backlog reduction will translate into a reduction in the jail population?,” Hidalgo asked.

The number of pending criminal cases in the county has decreased by more than 20% over the last year, according to Harris County’s district court dashboard. Despite the backlog reduction, the jail’s daily population has continued to increase.

As of Wednesday, there were 9,915 people in the jail and 1,051 people outsourced to other facilities, according to the Harris County Jail dashboard. The facility’s daily population has been dangerously close to maximum capacity since June 2022.

Last year, 27 people died with in custody — the highest number in nearly two decades, according to county records and data from Texas Justice Initiative. So far, at least four people have died while in custody this year.

The county’s budget office said the additional courts would cost the county about $30 million to build. After construction, the courts would cost nearly $17 million per year to operate.

On Wednesday, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said she supported adding more courts, but was concerned about the amount of time needed for the new courts to make a meaningful dent in the backlog and overcrowding in the jail.

“I would simply be concerned about the timing that we need time to ramp up,” Ogg said. “It’s not an immediate fix to the problems of the Harris County Jail. It would take time for the legislature to agree and approve, then implement, then you’d have to hire.”

One point to clarify here, Harris County cannot add more district courts to the mix. District courts are state courts, created by the Legislature. Harris County can add county courts, and has done so in recent years, but in the criminal context those are for misdemeanors. District courts are for felonies. The backlog here is in the felony courts.

District courts can also be Civil or Family, but they all come from the Legislature. Harris County has more district courts than any other county, but we are of course by far the biggest county, and we have had a total of two new district courts created here since 1984, and one of those was a Family court. Harris County is about twice as big as it was 38 years ago. District courts are numbered by creation date, so the higher the number the more recent the court. Since the 351st Criminal District Court was created, Fort Bend County and Montgomery County have each had five new district courts added. They have both grown exponentially over the past 40 years and absolutely needed those new courts, my point is that Harris needs some new ones, too. Six new district criminal courts sounds good to me, just on population growth alone.

That doesn’t mean those new courts would solve all of our problems right away – we have issues beyond the backlog, and even if we could snap our fingers and get these new courts tomorrow, it would take awhile for them to have any effect. Other issues, from mental health care at the jail to bail issues to who’s getting arrested and charged with what need to be dealt with, too. Along those lines:

Jail reform advocates say the DA’s Office should follow the recommendations of a 2020 report from the Justice Management Institute, which suggests the department dismiss “all non-violent felony cases older than nine months” in order to alleviate the number of pending cases. The report found that of all the county’s felony cases in 2019, about 57% were either dropped or deferred.

In response, Ogg said the recommendation was “an unrealistic solution.”

“Not only is it unfair, it’s basically unethical,” Ogg said. “If I were to simply dismiss cases because they were over nine months old, it would punish crime victims and it would punish innocent people who might be subjected to repeat crimes.”

Maybe dismissing them all is going too far, but we can certainly try to get our priorities in order. DA Kim Ogg was elected in 2016 in part on a platform of prioritizing violent crime over things like minor drug crimes. We could take a good look at that in deciding which of these years-old unresolved non-violent felony cases really need to be pursued and which can be safely let go. I don’t see why this should be controversial.

HISD facing budget cuts

Feb 20th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Gonna be a rough couple of years.

Amid declining enrollment and a looming $215 million deficit, the Houston ISD is eyeing budget cuts that would slash funding to the central administration and cut campus budgets, especially at high schools.

The initial cuts would cover about $60 million of the deficit in the proposed $2.28 billion budget. School closures may also be on the table in the long term — not in the upcoming school year — to make ends meet, according to discussion at a budget workshop this week and district documents. Thursday’s meeting was the first in a series to be held before the budget is adopted in June.

For years, the district has relied on its savings, which currently stand at $660 million, to cover deficits. But that won’t work going forward, officials say.

School districts’ funding is allotted from the state based on enrollment and attendance rates, both of which have been drastically dropping in HISD amid the pandemic. The district started this year with roughly 186,000 students, an 11 percent decrease from its pre-pandemic 209,309, according to Texas Education Agency data.

The district can’t continue with the status quo and needs to move with a sense of urgency, Superintendent Millard House II told the board.

“We’ve heard it before: There was a loss of 13,000 students in one year, the first year since COVID,” House said. “That’s a major piece of why this deficit has continued to grow. We’re here to address it.”

Improving attendance is one way HISD can increase revenue, but that wouldn’t have a major impact on the budget until fiscal year 2025, House said.

The HISD board also has the option to ask voters to approve a 3-cent property tax rate increase, which would generate about $65 million in additional revenue. However, it’s unlikely they would be able to hold an election in time for budget approval, House said. The district has also had pause in asking for a bond, out of fear a possible state takeover would erode support.

One option that has been top of mind for many parents during budget talks is whether there were be school closures, something the superintendent has hinted at in the past. There are no school closures or consolidations planned for the next academic year, but it is a tool that could be used in the future, HISD officials said.

Let’s be clear about two things. One is that nobody is going to like this, for the excellent reason that it sucks. None of the solutions, no matter how sensible and reasoned, will be well-received. Trustees may lose election over it, and Superintendent House may have a hard time holding onto his job, assuming he’ll want to stick it out till the end of his contract. I can’t stress enough how much this is going to suck.

And two, if HISD is now permanently at a lower level of enrollment, then the truth is that we almost certainly need to close and consolidate some campuses. We don’t have to rush into that – by all means, do everything possible to get students back and market to new students – but if the district really now has ten percent fewer students, then we have too much capacity and we need to scale back. Again, this sucks and everyone will hate it. No one wants their school to go away. I sure wouldn’t. Whatever we can do to minimize this reality, we should. But numbers don’t lie. And these numbers are telling us things we don’t want to hear. Let’s say it one more time: This sucks.

Anti-vaxxer defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist dismissed

Feb 2nd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Of interest.

A state district judge has dismissed Dr. Mary Talley Bowden’s defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist Hospital, which suspended the doctor’s privileges in late 2021 over COVID misinformation.

Judge Mike Engelhart, of the 151st Civil District Court, heard arguments Monday afternoon after the hospital asked to dismiss the case and strike evidence from the record. The ruling appeared on online docket Tuesday, but the written order has not been made available.

Bowden responded shortly after the decision on Twitter: “We will appeal.”

That’s the early version of the dismissal story. An earlier version, from before the ruling came down and which has more background on the suit, is here.

The hearing was the latest development in the months-long dispute between Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist who practices in River Oaks, and the hospital. The feud started in November 2021, after Methodist announced her suspension from its “provisional staff” and issued a statement saying the doctor spread “harmful” misinformation about COVID vaccines and treatment. The hospital also cited “unprofessional behavior,” including vulgar language on social media, as a key reason for the suspension.

The doctor, who later resigned, had been touting the benefits of ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19 at a time of intense public debate around the off-label use of the antiparasitic drug to treat the virus. Bowden also had suggested the COVID vaccines are dangerous. Large studies still show no benefit of ivermectin against the virus, and evidence shows the COVID vaccines are safe and effective.

Bowden filed her defamation lawsuit against the hospital in July 2022, saying she lost patients and was exposed to “public hatred, contempt, ridicule and financial injury.” Methodist has argued that medical evidence backs up its statements. The hospital also contends that Bowden repeated the alleged defamatory statements herself in multiple conservative media appearances and profited from the ordeal.

The central issue in Monday’s hearing was whether the doctor’s claims could be dismissed under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, which protects free speech.

LeRoy argued that Bowden became a public figure by “inserting herself” into a public debate about COVID, and that Methodist had to respond when she falsely stated the hospital denied care for unvaccinated patients — a claim Bowden later walked back. Bowden also could not provide clear enough evidence to show hospital officials made false statements or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, LeRoy said.

Biss countered that Bowden could prove the hospital made false statements, in part because the hospital portrayed her as an “unfit medical doctor” despite using her COVID data. Bowden previously had said she had been “sharing data” with physicians at Methodist to help them publish research.

“It wasn’t so dangerous or harmful that Houston Methodist didn’t rely and collaborate with Dr. Bowden,” Biss said.

LeRoy said that sharing data with physicians for research “does not mean she is right.”

“This is exactly the type of case that the (Texas Citizens Participation Act) is made for — accusations about a serious issue of public concern that aren’t based in any specific evidence,” LeRoy said.

Here’s a fairly simple explanation of the Texas Citizens Participation Act, sometimes called the Texas Anti-SLAPP Statute. More lawyerly explanations of it are here and here. My interpretation of this is that Houston Methodist successfully argued that Bowden’s lawsuit was an attempt to suppress their ability to freely talk about COVID. I’m happy to hear from real lawyers about this.

I think you can guess where my sympathies lie on this one. Looking in my archives I had not previously noted this case, but I did write about another unsuccessful anti-vaxxer lawsuit against Houston Methodist. We’ll see what if anything happens on appeal, a process that is likely to take years if it does go anywhere.

The ongoing referee shortage

Jan 31st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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This news is not new, though the cause being cited is different than the last time I read this kind of story.

The official shortage seen in the Houston area is part of a nationwide issue, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. So much so, in fact, that the NFHS — which oversees state associations like the University Interscholastic League in Texas — has launched a  campaign called “Bench Bad Behavior,” aimed at providing a remedy for abuse against officials during games.

The NFHS has dedicated resources to its member state associations to improve the behavior of coaches, parents, players and other fans.

NFHS chief executive officer Karissa Niehoff said pre- and post-COVID-19 numbers reveal that around 50,000 high school sports officials nationwide have left the profession.

“Despite our efforts for five years now to do a recruitment campaign, we still realize that loss,” Niehoff said during a Zoom session with national media last week. “We have some numbers that are coming back slowly, but we really want to not only call attention to the loss itself and the crisis itself but the reasons — more importantly, why? What we’ve found is the reasons officials do not stay in the profession really center around behavior.”

When the National Association of Sports Officials conducted its most recent nationwide survey during the summer of 2017 — drawing more than 17,000 participants — 57 percent said sportsmanship toward officials was getting worse. When it was asked who caused the most problems with sportsmanship, parents (39 percent), coaches (29 percent) and fans (18 percent) were identified as the top culprits. When it was asked who was most responsible for improving that sportsmanship, coaches (54 percent) and parents (23 parents) were again the top two answers.

NASO president Barry Mano also stressed the importance of school administrators correcting bad behavior in the stands. He said schools should be doing more to make officials feel protected and appreciated.

“Referees are in charge of the game; we’re not in charge of the environment,” Mano said. “So when a crew of sports officials comes to a site, they need to be better taken care of. They need to be recognized; they need to be secure. Do some things that make them feel welcome, make them feel respected. It’s not about money. We could solve the problem we’re taking about today if we started paying $500 a game for high school. We’re not going to do that. The shortage is not going to go away, so we need to do these other things.”

Over the summer of 2022, the Texas Association of Sports Officials took a hard stance and adopted a new policy aimed at stopping the abuse of officials. The two-section document is short and to the point. The goal is to “collaborate with schools where excessive verbal and/or physical abuse has occurred to provide a safe and more positive climate for all participants.”

The first section of the policy focuses on the abuse and warns that schools will be reprimanded if the TASO presidents council deems there is a culture of failing to control players, coaches or spectators. If those accusations are not met with sufficient action and results, the consequences will be severely punitive. It states, “For schools that fail to address their negative culture of abuse, a notification will be sent indicating that, effective on a certain date, there will be no TASO officials, in any sport, assigned to home games for that school until the issues are satisfactorily addressed.”

Other states also are taking action to battle the issue. The California Interscholastic Association, for example, implemented a bylaw that bans fans who assault officials from attending any future events.

Mano said attacks on officials have become a way-too-common occurrence in recent years.

“Today, we are getting reports in our office every single week of physical assaults against sports officials,” Mano said. “I believe it is important that administrators come to the realization that they are going to have to put some lines in the sand, saying that certain types of behavior are not going to be tolerated.”

Back in 2017, when I last wrote about this, the issue was simple demographics – Texas’ population, which very much includes the school-age population, was growing faster than TASO’s membership, which was trending older. I’m sure bad behavior by fans was an issue then as well, and I’m sure that demography continues to be an issue now, but the bad behavior issue is more acute. I’m a little surprised that the pandemic, which has been blamed for worse behavior by the public in a lot of other contexts, wasn’t mentioned here. I kind of think that a bigger problem is that we have an ever-increasing share of the public that doesn’t feel restrained by the kind of behavioral norms that we all lived by for generations – you know, all that “we live in a society!” stuff. There’s an obvious parallel to modern politics and the behavior of a certain class of politician that I’m sure you can infer on your own.

On that score, I’m a little surprised that there isn’t a lobbying effort to criminalize or enhance the punishment of this kind of abuse. I don’t know that that’s the best way forward, but I do believe that there have to be consequences for being that much of an asshole at a scholastic sporting event, and that it probably does make the most sense to put the onus on the schools to control their own fans. I hope it works.

Meanwhile, there is that other issue, and this time it seems that maybe there’s been a bit of progress.

Recruitment and retention are key components to battling the official shortage, both in Texas and across the country.

When faced with scheduling issues, Simpson started to take action. The Houston Soccer Officials Association does not appear to have a social media presence, so she decided to take matters into her own hands.

“I just started tweeting,” she said. “I got the link on how to become a ref from the HSOA website and started sending it to every college in our area. I sent it to friends. Three actually signed up. I was focused on getting as many refs as we needed to recover so we don’t have to do this (scheduling) plan.”

Another solution is trying to get younger people involved in the profession. For those who have already joined on, it’s about using the available resources to train, develop and retain them.

“As far as the guys doing it, even though there are some younger guys that are having to call games they’re not ready for, the Houston chapter has done a really good job of putting veterans with those young guys and mentoring them, training them and leading them the right way,” Heston said.

Carl Theiss served as a high school basketball official for 26 years and is currently the Bay Area representative on the state board for the Texas High School Basketball Officials Association. He has also spent time on the TASO state board and officiated junior college basketball in the area for more than 20 years.

Theiss said one of his primary goals as a member of the THSBOA education committee is to get younger people involved. It starts with providing an avenue to learn about officiating.

Simpson and Heston are both local high school coaches. I also noted in 2017 an effort by the Houston chapter of TASO to recruit women to be football referees. That subject was not noted in this story, but as I had wondered about TASO’s recruiting efforts back then, I’m glad to see that at least someone is taking action. This really would be a good job for social media, especially if you’re trying to reach a younger audience. Fixing the abuse problem will surely also help, but actively finding the next generation of refs and umps needs to be a priority for these organizations. I wish them luck.

FDA suggests annual COVID booster

Jan 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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I like the idea of this, which is to make COVID shots simpler and thus hopefully more likely to be taken, but it seems to be more nuanced than that.

The US Food and Drug Administration wants to simplify the Covid-19 vaccine process to look more like what happens with the flu vaccine, according to documents posted online on Monday. That could include streamlining the vaccine composition, immunization schedules and periodic updates of Covid-19 vaccines.

The FDA said it expects to assess circulating strains of the coronavirus at least annually and decide in June which strains to select for the fall season, much like the process to update annual flu vaccines.

Moving forward, the agency said, most people may need only one dose of the latest Covid-19 shot to restore protection, regardless of how many shots they’ve gotten before. Two doses may be needed for people who are very young and haven’t been exposed, who are elderly or who have weakened immune systems, according to the FDA’s briefing document for its vaccine advisers.

The agency is urging a shift toward only one vaccine composition rather than a combination of monovalent vaccines – which are currently used for primary shots and target only one strain – and bivalent vaccines – which are currently used for booster doses and target more than one strain.

The FDA briefing documents do not say whether the annual shot would contain a single strain, two strains or more. The annual influenza vaccine immunizes against four strains.

“This simplification of vaccine composition should reduce complexity, decrease vaccine administration errors due to the complexity of the number of different vial presentations, and potentially increase vaccine compliance by allowing clearer communication,” the FDA said.

The agency’s independent vaccine advisers, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, are scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss the future of Covid-19 vaccine regimens and will be asked to vote on whether they recommend parts of the FDA’s plan.

Vaccine experts had mixed responses.

[…]

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, said he sees the plan for an annual update as a balance between what science says is needed to fight the virus and what’s actually practical.

“I think it’s a balance, trying to do what the science says, which is the need for adaptability and flexibility. Yet the practicality that’s unlikely the companies can probably make that switch more than once a year,” he said.

But this plan also has some weaknesses, he notes. Annual updates are fine as long as the virus continues to evolve incrementally, based on previously circulating viruses. But he questions whether the world has enough genomic surveillance to catch a radically different variant that pops out of left field, as Omicron did.

“We don’t have the surveillance mechanisms in place globally. We don’t have the genomic sequencing in place globally. We don’t have the carefully orchestrated dance that took decades to build for influenza surveillance in place for coronavirus surveillance,” Hotez said.

The NYT has more from the scientists.

The proposal took some scientists by surprise, including a few of the F.D.A.’s own advisers. They are scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss the country’s vaccine strategy, including which doses should be offered and on what schedule.

“I’m choosing to believe that they are open to advice, and that they haven’t already made up their minds as to exactly what they’re going to do,” Dr. Paul Offit, one of the advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said of F.D.A. officials.

There was little research to support the suggested plan, some advisers said.

“I’d like to see some data on the effect of dosing interval, at least observational data,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, one of the advisers and editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. “And going forward, I’d like to see data collected to try to tell if we’re doing the right thing.”

Still, Dr. Rubin added, “I’d definitely be in favor of something simpler, as it would make it more likely that people might take it.”

Only about 40 percent of adults aged 65 and older, and only 16 percent of those 5 and older, have received the latest Covid booster shot. Many experts, including federal officials, have said that the doses are most important for Americans at high risk of severe disease and death from Covid: older adults, immunocompromised people, pregnant women and those with multiple underlying conditions.

In its briefing documents, the F.D.A. addressed the varying risks to people of different ages and health status.

“Most individuals may only need to receive one dose of an approved or authorized Covid-19 vaccine to restore protective immunity for a period of time,” the agency said. Very young children who may not already have been infected with the virus, as well as older adults and immunocompromised people, may need two shots, the documents said.

But some scientists said there was little to suggest that Americans at low risk needed even a single annual shot. The original vaccines continue to protect young and healthy people from severe disease, and the benefit of annual boosters is unclear.

Most people are “well protected against severe Covid disease with a primary series and without yearly boosters,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease physician and senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The F.D.A. advisers said they would like to see detailed information regarding who is most vulnerable to the virus and to make decisions about future vaccination strategy based on those data.

“How old are they? What are their comorbidities? When was the last dose of vaccine they got? Did they take antiviral medicines?” Dr. Offit said. At the moment, the national strategy seems to be, “‘OK, well, let’s just dose everybody all the time,’” he said. “And that’s just not a good reason.”

I am obviously not remotely qualified to weigh in on the merits. I like the idea of yearly boosters, because I already get a yearly flu shot and this is appealing as a neat and orderly risk-mitigation device. I’d like to think it might help increase the number of people who get boosted, but I’m not quite that optimistic. It would be nice to say that the science should prevail over the politics in this debate, but you can’t take the politics out of it, and you still need people to buy into whatever eventually gets recommended. Just try to make a good decision and don’t draw it out to the point where the only thing people hear about is the argument over the decision. StatNews has more.

COVID rates tick down again in Houston

Jan 22nd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Always a good headline to read.

COVID-19 data from the Texas Medical Center this week suggests the current wave may be subsiding, though experts urge caution as a new, highly infectious variant continues to circulate.

The average number of daily hospitalizations in the medical center had been rising steadily for a month, but dropped last week by about 20 percent, from 182 to 146. Regional COVID hospitalizations also have dropped from a five-month high of 1,002 on Jan. 5 to 836 on Monday, according to the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council.

Most significantly, the viral load in the city’s wastewater — the most reliable indicator of future virus spread — dropped by about 34 percent last week, according to data published Tuesday.

“I would be very surprised if we saw this (trend) reverse at this point,” said Dr. James McDeavitt, senior vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.

Even with a hopeful outlook, researchers cautiously are eyeing the progress of XBB.1.5, which public health officials say is the most transmissible form of COVID yet. It quickly has become the dominant strain nationwide. The variant accounts for 80 percent of cases in the Northeast, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though it has yet to beat out other infectious strains in Houston and much of the South.

Here’s that wastewater dashboard again. We’re still at a very high level compared to the July 2020 baseline, but at least we’re going in the right direction now. Hospitalization rate is the bigger concern, but again as long as we’re now trending downward, the overall picture is improving. There’s an argument to be made that we shouldn’t obsessively track each new alphabet-soup variant, at least not while they’re all about the same level of lethality. The fact that successive versions are more transmissible than their predecessors are just how viruses work. I’m not sophisticated enough to make a judgment about that, but I have limited my worry to the prospect of a deadlier strain.

There are still other things to worry about:

The United States has faced a triple threat of respiratory viruses over the past few months, with COVID-19, the flu and RSV driving infections and hospitalizations in the Houston area and elsewhere.

Each of the three are capable of causing mild to severe illness by themselves. But it’s also possible to contract more than one virus at a time — and a new study suggests a coinfection may lead to more severe illness in young children.

The term “flurona” became popular on social media last year as a surge in COVID-19 and the re-emergence of the flu caused a wave of infections. However, doctors were seeing patients — particularly young children — with coinfections before the pandemic, said Dr. Amy Arrington, medical director of the Special Isolation Unit at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“It’s not uncommon that we see younger kids getting co-infected,” she said. “I think a lot of parents today in Houston can say they feel like their child’s been sick for the past few months straight.”

Younger children might be more susceptible to coinfections because they haven’t been exposed to a respiratory virus before, Arrington said. They may be getting infected at daycare, or from an older sibling who picked up the virus at school.

Coinfections are uncommon, but doctors might be seeing them more frequently this fall and winter for a few reasons, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

The collision of COVID-19, the flu and RSV, as well as other respiratory viruses like rhinovirus and enterovirus, has created more opportunity for infection, he said.

“Tripledemic” was the word I heard. Fortunately, RSV and flu rates have been dropping as well. You can still get a flu shot, and for sure you can and should get your bivalent booster. Hell, I’m ready for whatever the next generation COVID booster is now. I’ll be among the first in line when that becomes available. You are your only real defense here, so do what you need to do.

New year, new omicron variant

Jan 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Stay safe out there.

A new omicron COVID-19 variant is spreading fast across the United States and beginning to make inroads in Houston, where the positivity rate continues to rise.

The new strain, XBB.1.5, was first detected on the east coast in late October and gained traction in December. Over the last four weeks, it has quickly edged out the previously dominant strains to make up 40 percent of cases nationally. It appears to be more transmissible than its predecessors, based on early lab results, with properties that help it evade vaccine immunity, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases with UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

Ostrosky and other experts say the new strain is likely contributing to the rise in cases throughout Houston, where the percentage of positive tests jumped from 8.1 percent to 11.1 percent last week, according to the most recent data from the Texas Medical Center. The average number of weekly COVID hospitalizations also saw a sharp uptick last week, from 529 to 663, including intensive care unit admissions.

The numbers are still a far cry from the original omicron wave one year ago, but infectious disease experts worry how waning immune protection will factor into the surge.

“We are at a moment in the pandemic where a lot of people got sick over the summer and immunity is going down from natural infection,” Ostrosky said. “Vaccine rates are not great and boosting rates are abysmal in this country … It does appear we’re converging into this immunity cliff.”

Only 15 percent of Americans over 5 years old have received the updated booster shot, first authorized for adults in August. About 30 percent of the country’s population has yet to complete the primary series, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the updated booster shot may not prevent infections from the newest variant, public health experts still say it’s the best way to prevent severe disease from COVID.

Same song, next verse. The good news for now, as Your Local Epidemiologist notes, is that this latest version of omicron, like all of its predecessors, isn’t any more virulent or deadly than before. Thus, hospitalization rates remain fairly stable, though they are currently going up. Flu and RSV infections are also declining, which helps. None of this matters if you or a loved one are getting sick. Get that bivalent booster and take the usual precautions. We will get through this.

It’s winter surge time again

Dec 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though I think you already suspected this.


COVID-19 cases are rising across Texas two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday, echoing last year’s surge of the omicron variant.

There are more than 18,000 positive cases across the state this week, up from a little over 7,000 the week of Thanksgiving.

“Thanksgiving this year was kind of like PTSD,” said epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, author of Your Local Epidemiologist. “I think all of us epidemiologists were holding our breath, just to make sure this was going to be a regular Thanksgiving.”

While hospitalizations and deaths are still low thanks to COVID-19 vaccinations and the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron, cases have been steadily climbing since November.

The change this year, Jetelina said, is the combination of flu, RSV, and now COVID. The Texas Department of State Health Services reports the intensity of influenza-like illness has remained “very high” in the past few weeks, with an increase in the number of influenza outbreaks and more than 28,000 positive flu tests in the week ending in Dec. 3.

“RSV and flu are just back with vengeance,” she said. “We’re starting to get a sneak peek of what this new normal is.”

Other states, like New York, have issued a health advisory to encourage people to mask indoors while cases are high. Jetelina said it’s important to think about protecting the most vulnerable members of the community, like the elderly and folks who are immunocompromised.

“I’m going to have 90-year-old people at my house for Christmas this year,” she said. “That, to me, means I am wearing an N-95 mask in public everywhere I go the week before Christmas. It helps ensure I don’t miss the event because I’m sick, but it also helps break that transmission chain so I don’t bring it to my grandparents.”

She says it’s not too late to get vaccinated to protect against COVID and the flu.

“I’m tired, everyone’s tired, [but] the virus isn’t tired of us,” she said.

We saw this coming in October, and we know what a “tripledemic” is. The virus levels in the wastewater are high. You know what I’m going to tell you: Get your bivalent booster and your flu shot. Wear that mask in crowded indoor spaces. Isolate yourself if you feel sick. Think about the high-risk people in your life. We’re not in 2020 any more, and the current dominant strains are thankfully not as virulent as delta was. You really can do a lot to maximize your safety while giving up very little. But you have to actually do it.

Recruitment of next summer’s lifeguards is already underway.

Dec 13th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Better luck this time, we hope.

The city has begun recruiting lifeguards for next summer following a significant staffing shortage that led to the closure of two-thirds of Houston’s public pools this past season.

The Parks and Recreation Department, which operates Houston’s 37 aquatic centers, usually begins its recruiting campaign in November, reaching out to high school and college students who make up the majority of its summertime employees, according to Leroy Maura, the city’s senior superintendent over aquatics.

In the past two years, however, staff were unable to go to most schools and colleges due to COVID-19 restrictions on visitors, Maura said.

The city’s public pool system requires 188 lifeguards to operate at full capacity, but only 60 were on staff this past summer. As a result, 25 pools were closed, with the rest opening only three days a week on a rotating basis. On a given day, swimmers could go to only one of six operating aquatic centers.

This is the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic that department employees are able to carry out in-person recruitment events. So far, city recruiters have visited 10 local high schools and signed up more than 130 students as prospective hires.

“We would go on campus and set up a table there,” Maura said. “My staff would be carrying information about the job, some pictures and the uniform to just kind of give them an idea of what it’s going to be like to work as a lifeguard.”

Based on past experience, the department needs at least 1,000 initial prospects to eventually hire about 180 lifeguards, Maura said.

[…]

The city raised the pay for pool staff in May in hopes of attracting more applicants, from $13.66 to $16 per hour for lifeguards; to $18 for head lifeguards; and $20 per hour for aquatic center supervisors.

Anyone with swimming skills who will be over the age of 16 by May 2023 can call the Parks and Recreation Department at 832-395-7129 or email the team at [email protected] to apply.

See here for some background. I would not have guessed that recruitment for this normally starts in November, but given the numbers involved I understand. With the Parks and Rec department able to do more in person events in the schools now, as well as the increased pay, hopefully the problems from last year will be history. In the meantime, if you’ve got or know a teenager who would qualify and might be interested, let them know about this.

Santa Claus is back

Dec 13th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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So, you know, you better watch out, and all that.

Some Santas who stayed home the past two years out of concern for their health have returned, but performers have pressing issues, including inflation, on their minds. Many are older, on fixed incomes and travel long distances to don the red suit. They spend hundreds on their costumes and other accoutrements.

Santa booker HireSanta.com has logged a 30% increase in demand this Christmas season over last year, after losing about 15% of its performers to retirement or death during the pandemic, said founder and head elf Mitch Allen.

He has a Santa database of several thousand with gigs at the Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York, various Marriott properties and other venues around the U.S. Most of Allen’s clients have moved back to kids on laps and aren’t considering covid-19 in a major way, he said, but Santa can choose to mask up.

Another large Santa agency, Cherry Hill Programs, is back up to pre-pandemic booking numbers for their 1,400 or so Santas working at more than 600 malls and other spots this year, said spokesperson Chris Landtroop.

“I can’t even explain how excited we are to see everyone’s smiles at all locations this season without anything covering up those beautiful faces,” she said.

Cherry Hill Santas are also free to wear masks, Landtroop said.

[…]

Allen and other agencies are juggling more requests for inclusive Santas, such as Black, deaf and Spanish-speaking performers. Allen also has a female Santa on speed dial.

“I haven’t been busted yet by the kids and, with one exception, by the parents, either,” said 48-year-old Melissa Rickard, who stepped into the role in her early 20s when the Santa hired by her father’s lodge fell ill.

“To have a child not be able to tell I’m a woman in one sense is the ultimate compliment because it means I’m doing Santa justice. It cracks my husband up,” added Rickard, who lives outside Little Rock. “I know there are more of us out there.”

By mid-November, Rickard had more than 100 gigs lined up, through HireSanta and other means.

“A lot of it is word-of-mouth,” she said. “It’s ‘Hey, have you seen the female Santa?'”

Rickard charges roughly $175 an hour as Santa, depending on the job, and donates all but her fuel money to charity. And her beard? Yak hair.

Eric Elliott’s carefully tended white beard is the real deal. He and his Mrs. Claus, wife Moeisha Elliott, went pro this year after first taking on the roles as volunteers in 2007. Both are retired military.

They spent weeks in formal Claus training. Among the skills they picked up were American Sign Language and other ways to accommodate people with disabilities. Their work has included trips into disaster zones with the Texas-based nonprofit Lone Star Santas to lend a little cheer.

The Elliotts, who are Black, say breaking into the top tier of Santas as first-time pros and Clauses of color hasn’t been easy. For some people, Eric said, “We understand that we’re not the Santa for you.”

Hope this is a better year for the Santa community. I’ve noted the Lone Star Santas and another Texas-based Santa employment agency before. These folks don’t make a lot of money doing this but they do have fun. That goes a long way.

A thousand days of the COVID disaster declaration

Dec 11th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Happy COVID Disaster Declaration Thousand-Day Anniversary to all who celebrate.

Thursday marks 1,000 days that Texans have been living under Gov. Greg Abbott’s public health disaster proclamation — an era of unprecedented gubernatorial authority for the state’s chief executive, triggered by the March 2020 scramble to contain the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to kill Texans every day.

The entire nation remains under a federal public health emergency at least through the winter season, which experts say could bring another wave of infections as families gather indoors for the holidays, immunity dips or virus variants sidestep older vaccines.

But after more than 92,000 deaths and 8 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in Texas in the 32 months since the declaration was made, the state remains one of less than a dozen still under a statewide declared disaster or public health emergency.

The proclamations give executive branches more power to quickly respond to disaster situations that are too urgent to wait for the usual bureaucratic wheels to grind into action.

In Texas, the disaster declaration gives Abbott’s executive orders — normally nonbinding — the weight of law.

Using them, he has the ability to suspend any regulatory statute or state agency rule without legislative approval, transfer money between agencies without legislative oversight, commandeer private property and use state and local government resources, evacuate populations and restrict the movement of the people, among other things.

[…]

The declaration was first made on March 13, 2020, and has been renewed 32 times since.

“Declaring a state of disaster will facilitate and expedite the use and deployment of resources to enhance preparedness and response,” the proclamation read.

At the time, 80 Texans had confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19. No deaths had been reported yet.

Under the public health disaster order, Abbott has made several unilateral decisions in response to the pandemic.

He extended the length of early voting in 2020 to help thin out Election Day crowds. He enacted mask mandates; directed state agencies to offer work-from-home options to employees; closed bars, gyms, nail salons and other businesses during one of the early surges; banned elective surgeries; limited long-term care visits; and capped venue occupancy until later removing those limits and banning cities from enacting them.

In his entire tenure as governor, Abbott has issued 42 executive orders. Most of them — 35 so far — are COVID-related and carry the weight of law. Only seven of them, none of which were binding, came in the four years before the pandemic hit.

His most enduring actions under the disaster declaration are a ban on cities and counties from enacting mask ordinances, vaccine mandates and occupancy restrictions — a provision that seems popular with most Texas Republican lawmakers and one of the main reasons Abbott’s office says he keeps renewing the disaster declaration.

There’s more so read the rest. As noted above, the main effect of this order has been to greatly increase Abbott’s executive powers, which he has used in part to wage his war on cities and Democratic counties. Some of those actions he has taken, specifically in regard to mask mandates, are still being litigated, with initial rulings going against Abbott but with the Supreme Court still to weigh in. Some of his actions have been helpful; the story cites an extension of emergency food assistance for needy families without additional oversight as an example. The Legislature could codify or rein in Abbott on any or all of these things, but they haven’t – you may recall the calls for a special session on various COVID-related topics that went unheeded – and they won’t. But I bet they would have if Beto had been elected Governor.

Abbott’s current COVID disaster declaration – we have to be specific here, as we are also under disaster declarations for the drought, the school shooting in Uvalde, the situation at the Texas-Mexico border and wildfires – ends on December 1, and it seems a likely bet that he will extend it again. He’s got a good thing going, no one will stop him, and yes, we may face another surge this winter for which such a declaration would be routine. It might even be a good idea in the hands of a better Governor. That’s not what we have here, but it’s probably going to be what we get.

I regret to inform you that “tripledemic” is a word

Dec 7th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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The good news is that we may avoid it here in Houston.

A collision of three respiratory viruses — COVID-19, influenza and RSV — may not hit Houston as severely as other parts of the country, experts say, but pediatric hospitals are still preparing for a busy winter season with at least some virus overlap.

Texas Medical Center data published Tuesday shows early signs of another COVID wave, with an uptick in hospitalizations and the positivity rate, which jumped from 3.2 percent to 5 percent last week. COVID wastewater surveillance also offers a grim outlook, as the viral load rose for the fifth straight week, to 196 percent of the baseline set in July 2020. Newer variants make it difficult to predict the size and severity of the next wave of infections, experts say.

Meanwhile, RSV and flu, two respiratory viruses that commonly infect children, continue to circulate at high levels, weeks after patients began filling beds and prolonging wait times in Houston pediatric hospitals. Despite the ongoing strain, infectious disease experts believe Houston can avoid a so-called “tripledemic,” in which three simultaneous virus surges overwhelm hospital systems.

Statewide surveillance shows both RSV and flu have either peaked or declined.

“At least for us, here in Houston, the story that’s being written is we had this very early peak of flu and RSV and they’re starting to come down,” said Dr. Wesley Long, the medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist. “But then we’re probably going to see a winter speed bump of COVID.”

Dr. Melanie Kitagawa, medical director of the Texas Children’s Hospital pediatric ICU, said there are roughly 50 children admitted to Texas Children’s with RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, which usually causes mild cold-like symptoms but can be severe for infants and older adults. That number has remained steady for at least a month, but flu admissions have been decreasing across the hospital system, she said.

Flu and RSV admissions have stayed at consistently high levels at Children’s Memorial Hermann for weeks, said Dr. Michael Chang, an infectious disease pediatrician at the hospital who is affiliated with UTHealth Houston.

Chang expects RSV to become more manageable before COVID ramps up. The percentage of positive RSV tests has dropped across the state since early October, from roughly 25 percent to less than 15 percent, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

For him, flu rates are more of a concern. Texas’ flu infection rate of 29 percent is among the highest in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“For flu, what I really worry about is that people have returned to normal behaviors, and vaccine uptake doesn’t seem to be really good,” he said. “From what I’ve seen of the new COVID numbers, we may see an unfortunate confluence of (COVID) and significant flu cases. But luckily I think we will avoid a full ‘tripledemic.’”

There are recent signs that the flu is waning as well.

See here for some background. We have milder winters here, so because we can still do stuff outside we can have a smaller winter effect from COVID. But the bottom line is the same as it always has been for minimizing the spread of these viruses. Get your COVID boosters, especially the bivalent booster. Get your flu shot. Keep wearing your facemask in crowded indoor spaces, and avoid such spaces where possible. You have the power and the choice to minimize your risk.

Beware of RSV

Nov 5th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Worrying.

Two common respiratory viruses continue to keep Houston pediatric hospitals unusually busy this time of year, with both the flu and RSV seeing a second surge following a rise in cases over the spring and summer, respectively.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, children sickened with either illness flocked to hospitals later in the winter months, from November to January. But intense isolation, social distancing and masking appears to have changed when those viruses spread, experts say, with a swath of young children being exposed for the first time.

It’s also unusual to see both viruses surging twice in the same year, puzzling top pediatric doctors in Houston.

“I was not necessarily expecting a surge right now,” said Dr. Michael Chang, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at UTHealth and Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital. “Having had a summer (RSV) surge, I was expecting that was it. It’s very unusual to have two surges in a single season. It happens, rarely, but it’s very uncommon.”

Both RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and the flu have similar symptoms with slight differences. Both illnesses produce cold-like symptoms. The flu is more associated with a higher fever, while a key indicator of RSV is wheezing, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Nearly all children catch RSV before age 2. Both illnesses often do not require hospitalization, but young infants and older adults with compromised immune systems are at higher risk of severe illness from RSV.

RSV saw a massive spike last summer, and Chang and other pediatric doctors had warned of another summer surge this year. But when cases initially started to rise in June, the numbers never dropped back to baseline levels. The statewide positivity rate for antigen tests hovered around 10 percent until September and early October, when the positivity rate jumped again to more than 25 percent, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.  Last summer, the statewide positivity rate for antigen tests surpassed 30 percent.

[…]

Influenza A, one strain of the flu, also is on the rise after an increase in March and April. Houston Methodist’s respiratory pathogen data shows the hospital system is seeing year-long high in weekly cases with 656.

Despite the unusual pattern, parents of young children in the Houston area should not panic, doctors say. While national reports indicate record high patient volumes in some parts of the country, Houston is better equipped than other large cities to handle the surge, with two large pediatric hospitals in Texas Children’s and Children’s Memorial Hermann. The dual virus threat also is nothing new for pediatricians, as the flu and RSV season often overlapped before the pandemic.

“This is how every December and January used to be in children’s hospitals across the country,” Chang said.

COVID cases remain low in the Houston area. While some hospitals may hit capacity on busier days, and patients may encounter long wait times, the small percentage of RSV and flu patients who need hospitalization should be able to find beds, doctors say. Dr. James Versalovic, chief pathologist at Texas Children’s Hospital, said parents should consult with pediatricians if their children have persistent symptoms, including coughing, fever, poor feeding or rapid breathing. Virtual appointments are also available if area hospitals are strained.

It’s not just happening in Harris County, either. It’s having some negative effects.

With respiratory illnesses spreading among children more widely and earlier than in previous years, hospital leaders and medical experts say pediatric hospital beds across the state are in short supply.

After two years of mild flu seasons — a result of mitigation strategies to limit the spread of COVID-19 — medical experts say the number of children developing respiratory illnesses is already much higher this year, leading to more visits to health care centers and increasingly strained resources to treat those children.

Experts say the strain stems from overburdened hospital systems still reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of medical providers.

Dr. Gerald Stagg, a pediatrician working in Mount Pleasant, said cases of respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, and an earlier flu season have added pressure to hospital systems on top of other respiratory illnesses caused by COVID-19 and other viruses.

“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Stagg said of the number of children needing treatment for respiratory illnesses this year.

With the higher rates of respiratory illnesses, Stagg said not only are hospitals filling up, but clinics like his are having trouble keeping up with the huge uptick in visits from children with the flu.

Stagg said it’s become more difficult over the last two months to find beds in larger medical systems for sick children who require higher levels of care than what rural hospitals are able to provide.

“We’ve had to even send kids to Arkansas or Louisiana from our Texas facility because we couldn’t find a bed,” Stagg said.

He added that the shortage of hospital beds is a risk to children with serious illnesses that are not respiratory because there isn’t sufficient space in intensive care units for them.

Carrie Kroll, the vice president of advocacy, public policy and political strategy at the Texas Hospital Association, said the shortage of pediatric beds is a workforce issue. Hospital systems are still dealing with staffing shortages after droves of nurses and other hospital workers, suffering from pandemic-related burnout, retired or left the field.

“A bed is a bed. If it doesn’t have anyone to staff it, you can’t put a kid in it,” Kroll said.

[…]

Dr. Iván Meléndez, the Hidalgo County health authority, said his region has enough beds and resources to meet the needs of the community at the moment.

Meléndez did warn that this year could have significantly more cases of the flu than previous ones. Federal health data released Friday reported 880,000 cases of influenza and 360 flu-related deaths nationally. The last time the country saw similar rates of the flu was in 2009. And flu season has just started; it generally spans from October to May.

Earlier this month, Hidalgo County reported one of the first deaths of a child due to the flu this season.

“We’re thinking this may be the third since the turn of the century of being a ‘high-flu’ year,” Meléndez said.

He said the prevalence of the flu this year is an unintended consequence of masking and isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As a community, worldwide, we didn’t develop those antibodies that are usually present in the community at some level to protect people,” he said.

To address the surge of respiratory illnesses, Meléndez and other medical experts strongly recommended vaccinations against the flu and COVID-19.

Sure would be nice if we had a governor that was capable of delivering that message. There’s no vaccine for RSV, but the flu shot and the bivalent booster are easily available, so do what you can to protect yourself. Your Local Epidemiologist has more.

Math test scores took a hit during the pandemic

Oct 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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The decline started before the pandemic, but kept on going from there.

Students in Houston and across the nation showed “appalling and unacceptable” declines on the 2022 Nation’s Report Card, adding to mounting evidence that the pandemic impacted young people already facing academic and mental health challenges.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said low-performing students’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were faltering even before the pandemic and now all performance levels are showing sharp declines. The nation must take swift action and invest more in education to reverse these troubling trends, he said.

“It’s heartbreaking, and it’s horrible,” Cardona said. “It’s an urgent call of action. We must raise the bar in education.”

The U.S. Department of Education administers the NAEP every other year to fourth- and eighth-graders across the country. Comparisons can be made among states, as well as among 27 of the country’s largest school districts. Desegregated results from Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Fort Worth ISDs are available, as are state totals. Score range from 0 to 500.

Results for Houston ISD show:

  • In math, the number of fourth-grade students performing “below basic” on the math NAEP increased 14 percentage points to 37 percent since 2019. On average, Houston ISD fourth-graders scored a 226, compared to 235 in 2019. The national average this year fell to 227.
  • The average score of a white fourth-grader in HISD on the math test was a 260, compared to a 212 for Black students and a 223 for Hispanic students. Additionally, 22 percent of white fourth-graders reached the “advanced” benchmarks of the math test, compared to 2 percent of Black and Hispanic students.
  • About 44 percent of eighth-graders in Houston ISD performed “below basic” on the reading NAEP, an increase from 41 percent in 2019. Their average score was 247, falling 2 points lower than 2019 scores and 8 points lower than the national average. White students averaged a 275, while Black students averaged 236 and Hispanics 244.
  • Additionally, only 4 percent of white eighth-graders in Houston ISD reached the “advanced” benchmark on the reading test.

Houston ISD Superintendent Millard House II said support services will be key to improving scores.

“While these challenges are not unique to HISD, providing students and families with the necessary academic and non-academic supports as detailed in our community driven five-year strategic plan, will address many of these needs,” House said in a statement. “We are confident that these investments in our students such as requiring a librarian, counselor or social worker, and supporting our schools with the highest need through our RISE program, will ensure a more equitable, targeted approach increasing positive academic outcomes.”

The first STAAR results post-pandemic weren’t so bad, but there was definitely an impact on poorer students. I feel reasonably confident that we can make up the lost ground, but what we can’t ever get back is those years of those kids’ lives. At a certain point, the effect of the learning loss has real long-term negative effects. That’s a problem that won’t go away.

One more thing:

There’s more to the thread, but you get the idea. Don’t let people go jumping to conclusions around you. The Trib and Texas Public Radio have more.

Is this just the calm before the next COVID wave?

Oct 17th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Things look good now, at least in the Houston area, but COVID never sleeps.

As the U.S. heads into a third pandemic winter, the first hints are emerging that another possible surge of COVID-19 infections could be on its way.

So far, no national surge has started yet. The number of people getting infected, hospitalized and dying from COVID in the U.S. has been gently declining from a fairly high plateau.

But as the weather cools and people start spending more time inside, where the virus spreads more easily, the risks of a resurgence increase.

The first hint of what could be in store is what’s happening in Europe. Infections have been rising in many European countries, including the U.K., France, and Italy.

“In the past, what’s happened in Europe often has been a harbinger for what’s about to happen in the United States,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “So I think the bottom line message for us in this country is: We have to be prepared for what they are beginning to see in Europe.”

Several computer models are projecting that COVID infections will continue to recede at least through the end of the year. But researchers stress there are many uncertainties that could change that, such as whether more infectious variants start to spread fast in the U.S.

In fact, scientists are watching a menagerie of new omicron subvariants that have emerged recently that appear to be even better at dodging immunity.

“We look around the world and see countries such as Germany and France are seeing increases as we speak,” says Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin. “That gives me pause. It adds uncertainty about what we can expect in the coming weeks and the coming months.”

However, it’s not certain the U.S. experience will echo Europe’s, says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina who helps run the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.

That’s because it’s not clear whether Europe’s rising cases are related to people’s greater susceptibility to new subvariants they’ve not yet been exposed to. In addition, different countries have different levels of immunity.

“If it is mostly just behavioral changes and climate, we might be able to avoid similar upticks if there is broad uptake of the bivalent vaccine,” Lessler says. “If it is immune escape across several variants with convergent evolution, the outlook for the U.S. may be more concerning.”

In fact, some researchers say the U.S. is already starting to see early signs of that. For example, the levels of virus being detected in wastewater are up in some parts of the country, such in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Vermont and other parts of the Northeast. That could an early-warning sign of what’s coming, though overall the virus is declining nationally.

“It’s really too early to say something big is happening, but it’s something that we’re keeping an eye on,” says Amy Kirby, national wastewater surveillance program lead at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But infections and even hospitalizations have started rising in some of the same parts of New England, as well as some other northern areas, such as the Pacific Northwest, according to Dr. David Rubin, the director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which tracks the pandemic.

“We’re seeing the northern rim of the country beginning to show some evidence of increasing transmission,” Rubin says. “The winter resurgence is beginning.”

As the story notes, we’re overall in a much better place because there’s a lot more immunity thanks to vaccinations and our previous high rate of infections. The COVID levels in wastewater here is low now, and while we’re hardly a leader in vaccinations, we at least have warmer winters so there are still plenty of opportunities to be outside, and fewer times where you have to be congregated inside. But also, not nearly enough people have had their bivalent boosters yet, and there are concerns about the flu season. So, you know, remain appropriately cautious – masking in places where you used to have to mask is still an excellent idea – and get those shots.

Microbreweries are getting back on track

Oct 16th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A bit of good news.

Texas craft breweries rebounded in 2021, a promising sign after the pandemic staggered the industry.

The state of beer: Of the state’s 10 largest breweries, seven increased production in 2021 compared with 2020, according to an Axios analysis of data from the Brewers Association.

Just one Texas brewery — Spoetzl Brewery — saw a year-over-year decline in production, but the Shiner-based brewery continues to see the highest sales in the state, with more than 500,000 barrels sold last year.

  • The state also saw 12 breweries close and 45 open, the data shows.

The big picture: The craft beer industry grew by 8% in 2021, while the overall market moved up 1%. Texas placed two breweries — Saint Arnold and the brewer of Shiner — among the nation’s 50 largest.

  • Yes, but: The rebound could be hampered by supply chain problems and a carbon dioxide shortage caused by contamination at an extinct volcano in Mississippi.

Yes, the CO2 shortage. Hopefully that will get worked out soon. You’d think of all the things on this planet we would not be short on that would be it, but here we are. I’d like to see this same reporting done on a more local level, say a Houston story about how all of the microbreweries in our area are doing now. There could be a lot of variance, based on size or location or business capability or just dumb luck. The growth of small breweries in Texas has been a huge success story, we should know more about how it’s going now this far into the COVID era. But at least at a high level, things are looking up.

Treasury Department investigating DeSantis

Oct 15th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Noted for the record.

The Treasury Department is now investigating whether the taxpayer money Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) spent to fly Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard for political theater last month came from federal COVID-19 relief.

Richard Delmar, the department’s deputy inspector general, sent a letter to a congressional delegation of Massachusetts lawmakers on Friday saying that his office was reviewing Florida’s use of the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF) that was established by the American Rescue Plan.

“We will review the allowability of use of SLFRF funds related to immigration generally, and will specifically confirm whether interest earned on SLFRF was utilized by Florida related to immigration activities, and if so, what conditions and limitations apply to such use,” Delmar wrote.

The Treasury official said the department planned to “get this work underway as quickly as possible.”

Delmar’s letter, which was released by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) on Wednesday, came in response to the request Markey and five other Massachusetts lawmakers had sent on Sept. 16 asking for a probe into DeSantis’ potential abuse of the aid.

“States should not be permitted to use COVID-19 relief funds for any parochial interest unrelated to the pandemic, particularly for naked political conduct that imposes severe and unjust harms on disadvantaged groups of individuals,” the lawmakers wrote.

While the $12 million DeSantis poured into the gambit didn’t come directly from Congress’ COVID-19 relief funds, it did come from the interest his state had earned off the aid, per the Washington Post.

See here and here for some background. Daily Kos adds some details.

The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had this past June urged the Treasury Department to open a probe into the Florida governor. DeSantis had not yet launched his cruel stunt dumping migrants across the country, but he had been seeking to use $12 million in federal coronavirus funding to aid his anti-immigrant platform. SPLC had warned in its letter that the “proposed misuse of these funds reinforces anti-immigrant policies,” as well as “sets a dangerous precedent.”

Damn, was that on money. DeSantis had already signaled last fall that he was going to make a scandal out of entirely routine flights that the federal government carries out, including under the insurrectionist president. When that didn’t stick long enough to his liking, he went to Texas to just carry out his own flights.

Markey’s office said it has been in contact with federal, state, and local officials regarding DeSantis’ cruel transportation of dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, with support from nonprofits like the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts. Markey’s office noted efforts to ensure that vulnerable children and adults transported by DeSantis from Texas to Massachusetts have been met with “continued care.”

DeSantis is not the only anti-immigrant governor under investigation by the Treasury watchdog, as a matter of fact. This past spring, Delmar said the department would be launching a probe into whether Texas Gov. Greg Abbott misused federal pandemic funds to keep his illegal Operation Lone Star border stunt operational. The Washington Post reported possible misuse of as much as $1 billion.

Congressional lawmakers led by Texas’ Joaquin Castro and Veronica Escobar had urged the watchdog to investigate Abbott using federal funds like his personal ATM for racist hate, writing that he was diverting money from critical public sector resources. “It is negligent and irresponsible for Governor Abbot to direct additional funding to Operation Lone Star, especially if the funding in question was intended to help Texans rebuild from the pandemic,” they wrote.

This story has just a tangential Texas connection, but I’m following it anyway out of sheer curiosity. Mostly, I want to see if it’s even possible for there to be consequences for would-be authoritarians like DeSantis, who will otherwise keep pushing boundaries since there’s apparently nothing to stop them. Along those lines, we also have this.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar on Thursday certified that 49 migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last month were victims of a crime. The move clears a pathway for those migrants to get a special visa to stay in the country that they otherwise would not have received.

Rachel Self, a Massachusetts attorney working with the migrants, told radio station WGBH that the move by Salazar is a key part of the migrants’ applications for a “U visa,” which is reserved for victims of crime or people who witnessed a crime. In a statement, Salazar said his office had submitted documents with the federal system “to ensure the migrants’ availability as witnesses during the investigation.”

Attorneys like Self are seeking the visas for the migrants on the grounds that they were taken to Martha’s Vineyard under false pretenses.

“Based upon the claims of migrants being transported from Bexar County under false pretenses, we are investigating this case as possible Unlawful Restraint,” Salazar said in a statement.

Salazar said his office has identified witnesses in the case but could not release their names because the investigation is ongoing.

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Salazar’s statement hinted that no action would be taken against the Republican governor, saying that “only those who were physically in our jurisdiction at the time of the offense are considered suspects.”

While it is no surprise that there were laws broken in this process, the idea that DeSantis himself could have been targeted by law enforcement was always a big stretch. He’d have plenty of cover even if there were a good circumstantial case to be made. Maybe if Perla does some singing if and when she’s ever hauled in, that could change, but again I would not bet on it. Perhaps just the idea that his own actions led to these migrants getting a long-term stay in the country will serve as a deterrent to future stunts like this by DeSantis. I’ll take what I can get. The Current has more.

UPDATE: Things get even more complex.

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine has opened an investigation into whether southern border state governors misled immigrants as part of what he called a “political stunt” to transport them to Washington.

Racine told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune his office is examining whether immigrants were deceived by trip organizers before boarding buses for Washington, including several hundred who were bused from Texas under instructions from Gov. Greg Abbott and dropped near the official residence of Vice President Kamala Harris. Racine’s office has the authority to bring misdemeanor criminal charges or to file civil fraud cases.

Racine said that in interviews with his investigators, arriving immigrants “have talked persuasively about being misled, with talk about promised services.” He offered no specifics about the inquiry, including whether it is being handled by his office’s criminal or civil divisions. The attorney general’s office declined to answer further questions.

Various state and federal laws could apply to transporting immigrants across state lines. Racine’s office could look into whether anyone committed fraud by falsely promising jobs or services, whether there were civil rights violations or whether officials misused taxpayers’ money.

[…]

Racine’s involvement ratchets up the pressure on the governors over their actions.

Elected as a Democrat, Racine criticized the Republican governors for using “people as props. That’s what they’ve done with the immigrants.”

Racine’s office can prosecute certain misdemeanors, and felonies are handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But its highest profile work has been bringing civil fraud lawsuits against nonprofits and businesses. In May, it reached a $750,000 settlement in a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, alleging that it had abused donors’ funds by overpaying for rentals at the Trump International Hotel.

The governors have said they have done nothing wrong in transporting immigrants to “sanctuary cities” that may be better equipped to care for them. They say they want the rest of the nation to share the burden of what they call the Biden administration’s open border policies.

[…]

Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, an advocacy group, said that some immigrants who were sent from Texas to Harris’ residence in Washington have told his team they were misled about their final destination. The immigrants believed they were bound for Union Station, the city’s central transportation hub, where many hoped to connect with family or trains and buses to other locations. Instead, he said, they were dropped off at about 6 a.m. in an unfamiliar spot, where a church group quickly organized to pick them up.

“I think they are being tricked and being used,” Garcia said.

Since the spring, buses have arrived almost daily at Union Station, where immigrants can now seek support from a new city Office of Migrant Services. So far, Texas taxpayers have spent about $14 million on migrant transportation, according to state records. Buses into Washington have continued in recent days, with several additional arrivals at the vice president’s residence.

As I said above, I don’t know how much actual accountability this can force, but it’s something.

School enrollment in Texas declined in 2020-2021

Oct 12th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Blame it on COVID.

Tens of thousands more students either dropped out or otherwise left Texas public schools during the 2020-21 school year, compared to previous years, according to the most recently available records from the Texas Education Agency.

The number of students who dropped out jumped roughly 34 percent from 46,319 students in the 2020-21 school year, which was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to 34,477 two years prior. The number of students who left Texas public schools for other reasons, including death, pregnancy or to enroll in other education programs or schools, was 79,071 in 2020-21, up more than 12,000 from the 2019-20 school year.

The dropout rate for students in grades 7 through 12 increased from 1.4 percent in the 2018-19 school year to 1.8 percent in the 2020-21 school year. The rate decreased during the 2019-20 school year to 1.2 percent.

High schools saw the highest increase in its dropout rate. The rate increased to 2.4 percent in the 2020-21 school year, from 1.9 percent in the 2018-19 school year.

The number of students who left to be home schooled increased about 30 percent to 29,846 in the 2020-21 school year from 22,967 in 2018-19. The increase is likely due in part to the impacts of COVID-19. In October 2020, only about 54 percent of Texas public school students were learning in-person.

Enrollment in 2020-2021 was at 5.3 million, down from 5.4 million the year before. I expect this number to bounce back, if only because the overall state population keeps growing and continues to be young, but this is a big blip and it needs urgent attention. That’s going to have to come from the locals, because the current crop of state leaders will do nothing to help. Yes, this is another reason to vote for Democrats this November.

The wastewater is looking good now

Oct 8th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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In terms of COVID levels, anyway.

The COVID-19 viral load in Houston’s wastewater has sunk to its lowest point in seven months as the city puts the latest wave, driven by the highly contagious omicron subvariant BA.5, in the rear view.

The wastewater levels are 71 percent of what the Houston Health Department detected during the July 2020 wave, which the city uses as a benchmark, according to Texas Medical Center data published Tuesday. The COVID hospitalization rate and positivity rate also continue to decline steadily.

Harris County last week dropped its COVID community level from “medium” to “low,” which recommends staying up to date on vaccinations and testing if you have symptoms. Scientists are looking to other countries for signs of what comes next.

“Our history has typically been a winter surge,” said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “So let’s enjoy it while we can.”

Several new omicron off-shoots have been detected in the United Kingdom, India, Singapore, Denmark and Australia, according to the journal Nature. BA.5 continues to dominate cases in the United States, though one subvariant, BA.4.6, has gained some traction and now makes up roughly 12 percent of cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ostrosky urged people to get their updated booster shots, which better target omicron variants.

The dashboard is here, and you can see it as a graph here. COVID from the omicron wave peaked in the wastewater in July, but it was at almost ten times the level as it had been in July of 2020. It is now at 71% of the July 2020 levels, which is much better in so many respects. Get up to date on your boosters – I got my bivalent booster the other day – and get a flu shot (got one of those as well, at the same time), because there’s concern this could be a bad flu season. And even with these levels going down, hopefully for the foreseeable future, it’s still a good idea to wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces. Might help you avoid catching a winter cold, too.

The new county COVID risk assessment system

Sep 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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We’ll see how it works.

Harris County has revamped its method for assessing the public’s risk for contracting COVID-19, replacing the threat level system that has been in place since early in the pandemic with a community level system that places a greater emphasis on new cases.

The change was made due to a “decoupling” of the relationship between new cases and new hospitalizations during the most recent wave of COVID-19 fueled by the BA.5 subvariant of omicron, Judge Lina Hildalgo said during a news conference Thursday. Harris County did not see a spike in hospitalizations as COVID-19 cases surged this summer, she said.

The new system will allow the public to make their own decisions about the level of risk they are comfortable with taking, knowing that the chance of being hospitalized with a severe illness is relatively low if they have been vaccinated and boosted, Hidalgo said.

“We’re turning a page on a phase of this virus, and I’m very hopeful that we won’t have to go back to a time when surge hampered the entirety of the community,” Hidalgo said.

Hidalgo said the threat level system had been an important tool for gauging risk throughout the pandemic. It had been updated before, but this week’s changes represent a “wholesale redesign,” she said.

The new system uses a trio of color-coded community levels that indicate the risk for contracting COVID-19. Low is green, medium is yellow and high is orange. Harris County is currently yellow, but Hidalgo anticipated the community level could rise to orange with the risk for transmission increasing with children back in school.

[…]

The Harris County Public Health website offers guidance for each of the three threat levels, including recommendations for wearing a mask, traveling and social gatherings when the county is green, yellow or orange. The site will continue to offer other pertinent information, such as wastewater monitoring data and the percentage of county residents who have been vaccinated and boosted.

I had to find the appropriate webpage for this on my own – click the embedded image to get there. The old threat level webpage now gives a 404 error. This new system seems fine and reasonable. The main concern is about what might come next.

Q: So how are we doing these days? The numbers certainly look better than they did.

A: They are falling, no doubt about it. But we have to keep in mind that we don’t have a lot of details about the real number of cases. Most of us are getting diagnosed at home using home testing kits. The numbers were always underestimating by a factor of four or five. Now it’s probably seven to 10. So you have to have to look trends.

Numbers are going down. But here are numbers I keep reminding people of: We’re still losing 400 or 500 Americans a day to COVID, which makes it the third or fourth leading cause of death on a daily basis in the United States. There’s still a lot of terrible messaging. People say we don’t have as many hospitalizations. Or that everybody has been infected or vaccinated or vaccinated with breakthrough. All of that is true. On a population level, it has had mitigating effects. But that doesn’t help you make an individual health decision.

People conflate that with individual health decisions. If you’re unvaccinated, there’s still a possibility you could lose your life to COVID. Even if you’re vaccinated and not boosted, there’s that possibility. And we’re seeing the boosters aren’t holding up as well as we’d hoped. That’s one of the reasons I’m strongly encouraging people to get this new booster, which has the mRNA for the original lineage and an added one against BA.5. After four or five months, there’s risk again for being hospitalized. The coverage declines from 80 percent to 50 percent protection against hospitalization.

Then this BA.5, even though it’s going down, it’s a long, slow tail. It’ll be around well into the fall. And the toughest thing to get people to understand is what’s going to happen in the winter. Obviously there’s no way to predict. But I think it’s still quite likely that we’re going to see a new variant just like we have the last two winters. Last winter it was omicron, BA.1. The winter before that we saw alpha. And new variants are arising because we’ve done such a poor job vaccinating low and middle-income countries.

We don’t know what a next variant could look like. More like the original lineage? Or something more like BA.5? The advantage of the new combined booster is that it gives you two shots on goal. It’s more likely to cross-protect against what’s coming down the pike. That’s no guarantee. But we’ve never done this before in terms of what the FDA does. We’ve never vaccinated against something that might be lurking out there. It’s a paradigm shift. What’s happening, and I don’t think the FDA will phrase it this way, but we’re creeping toward a universal coronavirus vaccine.

That’s from a Q&A with Dr. Peter Hotez, who knows better than I do. But I do know enough to say that you should get the omicron booster. And I also know enough to say that political stunts that endanger public health are bad. I think that about covers it.

Ken Paxton keeps trying to kill the SAISD vaccine mandate

Sep 20th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

On brand, always on brand.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed another petition seeking to reverse a Bexar County judge’s decision that rejected the state’s bid for a temporary injunction to block the San Antonio Independent School District’s staff vaccine mandate.

Even though SAISD’S vaccine mandate remains on pause despite the court’s ruling in its favor, Paxton said he will “continue fighting for medical freedom.”

“Nobody should be bullied, coerced, and certainly not fired because of their COVID-19 vaccination status,” said Paxon in his announcement, adding the decision is not only an affront to individual liberty, but “illegal under Texas law.”

“The governor’s executive order specifically protects workers from the type of mass firings that San Antonio ISD is seeking, and I will continue to fight in court to defend GA-39 and Texans’ medical freedom,” he said.

The petition was filed Sept. 7 with the Texas Supreme Court.

An SAISD spokeswoman said in a statement that the vaccine mandate remains suspended and that no employee was ever disciplined for refusing to get the vaccine.

See here and here for the previous updates. There’s a recitation of the long history of this legal saga in the story if you want that. I remind you that this mandate was never enforced and remains on pause, not that these things matter to Ken Paxton. The appellate court ruling that Greg Abbott doesn’t have the power he claimed to have when he forbade these mandates seems pretty clear to me, but you never know what SCOTx will do. Now we wait to see if they’ll take this up.

Our overall vax level is down

Sep 13th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Not great!

The coverage rate for routine childhood vaccines – or the percentage of kids getting them – dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic and have yet to recover, according to statistics from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Health care providers said many families skipped doctor’s visits during the pandemic to avoid exposure to the virus. But the drop is also due to a rise in “conscientious exemptions,” or parents and guardians who refuse to get their children vaccinated for religious, moral or philosophical reasons.

While anti-vaccine movements have existed since the smallpox vaccine debuted in the early 1800s, some worry the pushback against the COVID-19 vaccine may have a detrimental effect on the uptake for routine childhood immunizations, too.

“I think that, certainly, [the pandemic] is a good explanation for this,” said Terri Burke, the executive director of the Houston nonprofit The Immunization Partnership. “But there is no question that the vaccine hesitancy, skepticism, misinformation [and] disinformation that circulates around the COVID vaccine has bled over into childhood vaccines.”

A study published in the journal Vaccine found that from 2019 to 2020, immunization rates fell 47 percent among 5-month-olds and 58 percent among 16-month-olds.

Texas did see a slight increase in vaccination rates earlier this year, but they still remain below pre-pandemic levels, said Tasmiah Nuzhath, a Texas A&M School of Public Health doctoral candidate who led the study. That’s a concern because regardless of the reason, a lower percentage of vaccinated children means heightened for outbreaks of a disease like the measles, she said.

“Even a few-percentage dip in vaccination rates will put children at risk of getting sick, and could affect community protections against serious diseases,” Nuzhath said.

[…]

In the Houston area, there are some signs that coverage rates may be slowly recovering from the pandemic. The HOPE Clinic, for example, had a large demand for the shots before students returned to school this fall, Clinical Director Kara Green said.

The Immunization Clinic in Stafford has also seen more children coming in for their vaccines this year, but coverage rates are “still not where [they] should be,” Nursing Director Yvette Cheeks said.

During the 2011-12 school year, coverage rates were at least 97.4 percent for each of the routine vaccines required for kindergarten students, and at least 96.6 percent for each required for seventh grade.  By 2021-22, rates fell to a range of 93.5 percent to 95.9 percent for kindergarten, and 91.9 percent to 98 percent for seventh grade.

Some of the decline can be attributed to children who haven’t gotten their shots yet, but may do so later. Those “delinquency” rates topped 3 percent for the chickenpox, polio and DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis) vaccines for kindergarten and around 6 percent for the meningitis and DTaP vaccines for seventh grade.

It’s also due to a rise in conscientious exemptions. Ten years ago, the chickenpox vaccine for kindergarten had the highest rate of conscientious objections at 0.8 percent. By last year, rates hit at least 2.1 percent for each kindergarten vaccine and at least 1 percent for each seventh grade vaccine.

Those percentages may not seem like a lot, but they represent an increase from 28,432 conscientious objections across Texas in 2011-12 to 85,726 last year, according to TDSHS statistics.

Green and Cheeks believe coverage rates could increase through better access to the vaccines. Both the HOPE Clinic and the Immunization Clinic offer vaccines to lower-income and uninsured patients.

However, Green noted that the HOPE Clinic sees families cancel their child’s vaccine appointment due to issues such as a lack of transportation, or not having child care for their other children. Pop-up vaccination clinics at Houston schools or other community sites could help increase uptake, she said.

“I think if we make it easier for families to get these things done, then we really open up a lot of opportunities,” she said.

We need to do everything we can to make sure that all needed vaccines are easily available to all that want them. That’s a bigger problem that can be solved locally, but we have to try. Anyone can claim to be “pro-life”, but unless you’re pro-getting-lifesaving-shots-into-kids-arms, you’re just full of hot air.

Coulda Been Worse

Sep 11th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Are you ready for some attack ads?

A shadowy new group has purchased at least $6 million in TV ads ahead of the November election and is airing an ad that targets Gov. Greg Abbott as he runs for reelection.

The minute-long ad from Coulda Been Worse LLC, which started airing Friday, rattles off a list of major calamitous events that have happened on Abbott’s watch, like the Uvalde school shooting and 2021 power-grid collapse. As the narrator speaks, a picture slowly zooms out to show Abbott’s face.

“Any one of these — a terrible shame for Texas,” the narrator says at the end. “All of these — a horrific sign something big is terribly, terribly wrong.”

The spot ends with a clip of Abbott saying after the Uvalde massacre that it “could have been worse,” increasingly a rallying cry of Abbott’s critics. Abbott made the comment while praising the law enforcement response to the shooting, which has since been been widely criticized for taking well over an hour to confront the shooter. Abbott later said he was “misled” when he made the comment.

The advertising represents a significant escalation as Abbott fights for a third term against Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Abbott has led O’Rourke by mid-single digits in polls throughout the summer.

Here’s the ad, which I can’t find right now on YouTube in part because there’s a song called “Coulda Been Worse” and in part because there’s a ton of video clips of Abbott’s original “could have been worse” quote.

60-second ads always feel interminable to me, but I’m not sure how you cut this one down. I mostly encounter ads like this when I watch sports – the college and NFL football seasons are just rife with this stuff, especially in even-numbered years – so I’ll be interested to see how often I encounter it. What’s your reaction?

Your omicron booster will be ready this week

Sep 5th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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I’ll be getting mine.

Most Texans will be eligible in the coming days for a second round of Covid-19 booster shots after updated vaccines got final federal approval this week.

The new doses, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are designed to fight off severe infection from the latest versions of the omicron variant, which have proven especially easy to spread. Federal health officials hope the new round of boosters can add a layer of immune protection heading into a potential uptick of infections this fall as people head back indoors.

The new boosters will be available to anyone 18 and older for Moderna’s, and anyone over the age of 12 for Pfizer-BioNTech’s. Older adults have been eligible for several months.

“If you are eligible, there is no bad time to get your COVID-19 booster and I strongly encourage you to receive it,” the Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky said Thursday after endorsing an advisory committee’s recommendation to make the shots widely available.

The updated vaccines add spike protein components from the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which helps restore protection that has waned since previous vaccine rounds. The CDC recommends waiting two months after your most recent COVID shot before getting the booster.

A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services said the doses are expected to ship out in the next few days, so Texans should be able to make appointments next week. Like previous boosters, these will be available at pharmacies, standalone health clinics and through local health departments, the agency said.

Both CVS and Walgreens were allowing patients to schedule the updated boosters as of Friday.

As the story notes, while COVID deaths in Texas are way down – about 100 a month statewide at this time – people are still getting infected. Plenty of people I know have been sidelined for a week or two in recent months. Long COVID and other risks remain as well. I’m still pretty vigilant about masking in indoor spaces, which usually puts me in a distinct minority, but it’s just a numbers game, and sooner or later that catches up to you. I’ll add on another layer of defense for that, thanks very much.

First school ratings since 2019 released

Aug 16th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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All in all, not too bad. But for poorer schools and school districts, it remains a very hard go.

The Texas Education Agency on Monday released its first public school ratings in three years and despite pandemic interruptions, the number of schools that received the highest rating increased.

This year, 27.9% of 8,451 schools evaluated received an A rating. Another 46.1% received a B, 19.4% received a rating of C and 6.7% received “Not Rated” labels. Not all schools and districts are rated because some are alternative education programs and treatment facilities.

The state agency’s ratings — tied in large part to results of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test — are the latest metrics used to grade how well Texas public schools are performing as students emerge from the worst of the global coronavirus pandemic. Even though students returned to classroom instruction last year, surges in COVID-19 infections both last fall and winter forced some schools to close and revert back to remote instruction.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath credited local educators with the increases seen, despite those interruptions, in each of the A and B categories and a reduction in the number of schools that received below-average grades, those in the “Not Rated” category.

“These results show our state’s significant investment in the post-pandemic academic recovery of Texas public school students is bearing fruit,” Morath said. “I’m grateful for the driving force behind this year’s success: our teachers and local school leaders.”

The TEA’s ratings are determined by scores in three categories: how students perform on the STAAR test, which is given each spring; improvement in those scores; and how well schools are educating disadvantaged students. Students are tested on different subjects: reading, math, science and social students.

Districts also get an overall rating. There are a total of 1,207 school districts in Texas, and 1,195 were evaluated. Out of the districts evaluated, 33.1% got an A, 54% got a B, 9.4% got a C and 3.5% got a “Not Rated” label.

[…]

In 2019, the last time that TEA put out these ratings, 8,302 schools were rated, and 21.1% received an A, 39.5% received a B, 26.1% received a C and 13.3% received failing grades. In 2019, 1,189 districts were rated. Of those, 25.3% received an A, 56.9% received a B, 13% received a C and 4.8% received failing grades.

Texas continues to show some struggle with getting “high-poverty” schools an A grade. Data shows that only 18% of those campuses in Texas were rated an A. The TEA labels schools as “high-poverty” if their number of economically disadvantaged students surpasses 80%. Of the schools that received a “Not Rated” label, over half of them were “high-poverty” schools.

Texas has about 5.4 million students in its public schools, and 60% of them are economically disadvantaged, meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch. Out of the 8,451 schools rated this year, 564 campuses received the “Not Rated” label. Most of these “Not Rated” campuses — 499 — serve students who live in some of the state’s poorest communities.

While there is work to be done with Texas’ poorer schools, Morath said, the increase among the A-rated schools — a rise seen after the pandemic interrupted classroom instruction — means the state is on the right track to catch students up to pre-pandemic levels.

This spring’s STAAR results showed big gains in reading. While math scores did increase from the dips seen in 2021, they revealed that Texas students still have work to do to catch up to their pre-pandemic test score levels.

You can see all the results here. The Chron complied results for area schools; HISD overall got a B, but some schools such as Kashmere and Yates high schools were Not Rated, which is the grade given in place of a D or F this year. Those grades will return next year. As I said, all things considered this isn’t bad, but there remains a lot of work to do. We need the Lege to not do anything to screw it all up next spring. Reform Austin has more.

At least you’re (probably) not giving birth in West Texas

Aug 13th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

This is a long story about the lack of prenatal and obstetric care in West Texas. It’s mostly set in Alpine, Presidio, and Big Bend, which are the “big cities” in the area that actually have doctors and medical facilities in them. The one hospital in the area is in Big Bend, and its labor and delivery unit is now closed much of the time, for a variety of reasons. This is a small taste of what it’s like to be pregnant in this part of the state.

Big Bend is the only hospital in a 12,000-square-mile area that delivers babies. If Billings’s patient goes into labor when the maternity ward is closed, she’ll have to make a difficult choice. She can drive to the next nearest hospital, in Fort Stockton, yet another hour away. Or, if her labor is too far along and she’s unlikely to make it, she can deliver in Big Bend’s emergency room. But the ER doesn’t have a fetal heart monitor or nurses who know how to use one. It also doesn’t keep patients overnight. When a woman gives birth there, she’s either transferred to Fort Stockton—enduring the long drive after having just had a baby—or discharged and sent home.

This situation is stressful and dangerous for pregnant women. Uterine hemorrhages, postpartum preeclampsia (a potentially deadly spike in blood pressure), and other life-threatening complications are most likely to occur in the first few days after childbirth. This is why hospitals usually keep new mothers under observation for 24 hours to 48 hours. “This is not the ‘standard of care’ that women should receive,” Billings says. “You’re not supposed to discharge patients and leave it up to chance.”

Big Bend doesn’t really have a choice. In the past two years, almost all its labor and delivery nurses quit. The hospital has tried to replace them, but the national nursing shortage caused by the pandemic has made that impossible. When Big Bend is too short-staffed to deliver a baby safely, its labor and delivery unit has to close.

[…]

Medicaid pays for 42 percent of all hospital births, but it doesn’t reimburse hospitals for the full cost of care. (In most states it pays between 50 cents and 70 cents on the dollar, which means a hospital loses money when it cares for someone on the program.) To offset its losses, a hospital often charges its privately insured patients significantly higher fees. But if it’s in a poor neighborhood and doesn’t have enough privately insured patients, it can’t recoup the money. So most pre-pandemic maternity ward closures were in low-income areas and disproportionately affected pregnant women of color. Pandemic-related nursing shortages have only made the situation worse. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in Texas.

The state is the national leader in maternity ward closures. In the past decade, more than twenty rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies. More than half the state’s rural counties don’t even have a gynecologist. Texas has some of the lowest income eligibility limits for Medicaid and has declined to expand them, as allowed by the Affordable Care Act. (Childless adults don’t qualify for the program unless they’re disabled.) As a result, more than 18 percent of Texans don’t have health insurance, the highest percentage of uninsured residents in the U.S. Income eligibility limits jump for pregnant women—$36,200 for single mothers, $45,600 for married ones—but the application process takes at least a month. According to the March of Dimes, a fifth of all pregnant women in Texas don’t get prenatal care until they’re five months along. In other words, when a poor woman gets pregnant in Texas, it’s hard for her to find a doctor or even a hospital.

“What we’re seeing in terms of health outcomes, it’s not good,” says John Henderson, chief executive officer and president of the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals. “We have lower birth weights, more preterm births. When it comes to caring for pregnant women and their babies, Texas does not compare favorably to other states.”

Like I said, this is a long story and it’s worth your time to read. I’m old enough to remember when tort “reform”, in particular putting a cap on damage awards that can be given in medical malpractice lawsuits, was supposed to usher in a new era of doctor abundance in Texas. I don’t think that has worked out in the way we were promised. Towards the end, one of the doctors the author spoke to for the story notes that since abortion was already impossible to get in their region, the new state ban on abortion likely won’t result in more babies being born there. These docs will still deal with miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening situations – they tell some amazing stories – despite the threat to their own safety. Click over and read on for more.

It’s not a teacher shortage yet

Aug 10th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

But you can see one on the horizon.

School districts across the Houston region are trying to fill thousands of teacher vacancies before most will be welcoming students back to classrooms in the coming weeks.

A review of about 18 area school districts’ job listings, including Alvin, Deer Park, Fort Bend, Galena Park, Goose Creek, Katy, Magnolia, Pasadena, Galveston, Humble, Spring Branch and Spring ISDs, as well as Lamar CISD, showed a need for more than 3,400 educators to fill a variety of vacancies as of Monday.

The Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest system scheduled to kick off its year Aug. 22, had about 870 openings for certified teachers listed on its career portal Monday.

Aldine ISD, which serves nearly 67,000 students and employs more than 4,000 educators, currently has 370 teacher vacancies. That number is “way up” from previous years, according to administrators, despite recruiting efforts that include signing bonuses, increased salaries and looking for applicants internationally. Klein ISD is searching for 120 teachers, according to its website. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the state’s third-largest system, is trying to fill 472 teaching vacancies.

It is a nationwide problem as low pay, long hours and the politicization of education have taken their toll on the beleaguered profession.

“You look across the state and across the country, there are districts even smaller than us with even more vacancies,” HISD chief talent officer Jeremy Grant-Skinner said. “We’re all feeling the challenge together of staffing during this very unique time. We’re feeling like we’re going to get as close as we can.”

HISD, with roughly 195,000 students and 27,000 full- and part-time employees, had about the same number of vacancies at this time a year ago, Grant-Skinner said, before reducing it to about 400 by the time schools opened. To fill those openings until certified educators could be hired, the district sent central administration staffers who held teacher certifications into classrooms. Grant-Skinner said there have been no conversations about doing that again this year.

The 870 openings represent about 8 percent of the 11,000 teachers included in the upcoming year’s budget.

Since then, the district has raised teacher pay, hoping it will help recruit and retain educators. Several other districts, including Katy and Cypress-Fair ISDs, also have boosted teacher salaries.

Emphasis mine. I highlighted that to note that this problem, at least for HISD, is not unprecedented. The gap was more than cut in half least year, HISD was able to fill in other vacancies from within, and they have raised their pay as a way to attract new job seekers. There are obviously a lot of major challenges facing teachers now, most of which are the result of actions taken by Republicans, but it’s too soon to say for this year that the problem is getting worse. That may end up being the case, and it’s good to draw attention to this now, I just want to be a little cautious about getting ahead of ourselves.

That said, there are other danger signs out there that should be taken seriously.

More Texas teachers are considering leaving the profession than at any point in the last 40 years, according to new polling from the Texas State Teachers Assocation.

The survey found that 70 percent of teachers were seriously considering quitting this year, a substantial jump from the 53 percent who said so in 2018, the last time the typically biennial survey was conducted. Teachers attributed their grim outlook to pandemic-related stress, political pressure from state lawmakers, less support from parents and stretched finances.

The survey represented all grade levels and regions of the states. It was skipped in 2020 amid of the pandemic.

[…]

In the survey, which was completed by 688 Texas teachers, 94 percent said the pandemic increased their professional stress, and 82 percent said financial stress was exacerbated. Experts have pointed to better pay as a key way to recruit and retain teachers. Respondents taught for about 16 years on average, and their average salary was around $59,000. That’s about $7,000 below the national trend, according to the teachers association.

Besides salary, Texas teachers on average also receive some of the worst retirement benefits of those in any state, a separate study from June found. Teachers who have retired since 2004 have not received a cost-of-living adjustment, although the Legislature has routinely passed “13th check” bills that send extra annuity payments.

In addition to pay, 85 percent said they felt state lawmakers held a negative view of teachers, 65 percent said the public held a negative view and 70 percent said support from parents had decreased over the last several years.

If your job is more stressful than before, if you don’t feel respected by the powers that be or your stakeholders, and if on top of that you could make more money doing something else, well, that’s a pretty powerful combination. We can take this feedback seriously and try to do something about it, or we can ignore it and risk having to deal with a crisis situation later. Seems like a straightforward choice to me.

Houston will monitor for monkeypox in the wastewater

Aug 7th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Seems like a good idea.

Houston will begin monitoring its wastewater for monkeypox in late August as cases of the blister-causing contagion continue to climb, health officials said.

Scientists will begin testing for the monkeypox virus in city sewage samples “starting in about three weeks,” Houston Health Department spokesperson Porfirio Villarreal said Thursday morning.

There are 152 cases in Harris County, 131 of those in Houston, the county’s Public Health Department reports. More than 6,300 Americans had tested positive for monkeypox as of Wednesday, nearly 500 of them in Texas. Many cases have been among gay and bisexual men, but the disease can be spread among anyone via close contact.

To collect the data, Houston scientists will take weekly samples from flushed wastewater at sewage treatment plants across the city. Once tested, the samples will give scientists a snapshot of which neighborhoods have the most monkeypox virus.

Health officials have used wastewater tracking to monitor COVID-19 levels in the city’s sewage since the beginning of the pandemic to understand how quickly the virus is spreading among the city’s two million inhabitants. The tracking project, a joint effort by Rice University and the Houston Health Department, offers clues to the severity of the pandemic that may be invisible in testing data.

We are familiar with the track-COVID-in-the-wastewater project, which has been a resounding success (and which is currently showing a decrease in the levels, praise be). Not clear yet if this data will show up on the same dashboard or if there will be a new one, but we’ll know soon enough. I’ll be on the lookout.

William-Paul Thomas

Aug 6th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This is bad. The question is how much worse might it be.

William-Paul Thomas, the mayor’s council liaison, was offered more than $13,000 by a local bar owner to help him pass a building inspection and fast-track a new permit to reopen a bar as a restaurant, newly unsealed court documents show.

Thomas contacted the “relevant” fire official to ensure the unnamed business owner passed the inspection in May 2020, prosecutors wrote, and then he used his position in the mayor’s office to “pressure other officials” to approve the permit in July, as well. He was paid an undisclosed amount of money for his efforts.

Thomas pleaded guilty on July 25 to one federal count of conspiracy to accept a bribe. He will appear for sentencing before U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen on Nov. 28. His lawyer, Monique Chantelle Sparks, did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The documents were sealed until Wednesday morning at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s office. The Chronicle published an article about the allegations Tuesday night. Thomas’ plea deal, however, remains sealed.

It is unclear whether federal investigators are looking into the unnamed city officials Thomas allegedly worked with to get the certificate and permit approved, or if they are conducting a broader inquiry into City Hall affairs.

Sean Buckley, a legal expert on federal judicial procedures, said Thomas’ quick guilty plea and his willingness to forgo a probable cause hearing before a grand jury means he likely agreed they had strong information against him. It also suggests Thomas may be part of a wider investigation by the Justice Department.

Thomas abruptly resigned from his City Hall position last Wednesday, one day after pleading guilty. He told the mayor in an 11:30 p.m. email he was retiring due to health reasons.

[…]

City Attorney Arturo Michel said later Wednesday the office of the inspector general is opening its own investigation, based on the document’s charges that Thomas worked with officials in the fire department and permitting office to approve the requests.

Prosecutors say the bar owner — whom they did not name — needed to pass a city fire inspection to get a temporary certificate of occupancy in May 2020. He turned to Thomas for help.

“Thomas, in his official capacity, placed calls to the relevant Houston Fire Department official to ensure that COMPANY 1 would pass its fire inspection and be issued its TCO,” the charging document says. The owner then paid Thomas an undisclosed amount of money after he got the certificate.

It is not clear which fire department official Thomas contacted. Fire Chief Samuel Peña said it difficult to identify the person without the name of the business.

The business owner reached out again in June 2020, after his bar — a separate business — was shut down by the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission. COVID-19 restrictions around that time ordered bars to close but allowed restaurants to continue operating with limited capacity.

“On July 6, 2020, BUSINESSMAN 1 offered THOMAS up to $13,0000 to have the necessary permit issued quickly so that COMPANY 2 could reopen,” the document says. “THOMAS agreed to use his official position to pressure other officials to issue the permit quickly, all in exchange for money.”

Thomas then used his position to “pressure other officials” to grant the necessary permit, and the owner was allowed to open as a restaurant. It is not clear which specific permit the owner was seeking from the city; the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission was responsible for classifying bars and restaurants based on the percentage of sales that came from alcohol.

Buckley, a federal defense lawyer who represented former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman and authored a book on federal criminal rules and codes used by trial attorneys across the country, reviewed the court documents at the request of the Houston Chronicle. He is not involved in the case.

“He’s obviously cooperating because no one who is a target in a federal investigation would ever agree to plea to a criminal information unless there have been extensive discussions between the target, his lawyer and the government leading up to that decision,” Buckley said.

“Either the government lawyers showed him what they had or he knew what they had. He knew he had everything to gain by cooperating and agreeing to plead guilty without forcing the government to get an indictment from the grand jury, and much to lose by not cooperating.”

Buckley said it also clear the investigation, by prosecutors from the public corruption unit, has been going on for months and there likely is a wider-ranging investigation underway involving multiple defendants.

“My read on this is that this person has something of value to the government,” Buckley said.

He said the documents also indicate “there is an environment in the city of Houston that allows this type of thing to take place.”

I will say up front that I am acquainted with William-Paul. As is the case in this kind of situation, I’m shocked to see the story. I don’t know him well enough to say more than that, but as I have met him and talked to him, I wanted to say so.

I Am Not A Lawyer, and I have no experience in these matters, but it seems to me unlikely that there would be only one such transgression like this. If nothing else, I would think the FBI wouldn’t prioritize a case with one crime of this nature. I’d expect that the bribe payer and whoever was involved with the Fire Department and permitting office will be implicated next. The big question is then whether it goes beyond that, and if so how far. There is certainly the potential for this to be big, but we won’t know until the FBI tells us, and as we know from other experiences that may take a long time. In the meantime, I wouldn’t want to be BUSINESSMAN 1 or anyone else who might be implicated. Don’t take or give bribes, y’all.

The latest COVID wave may be peaking in Houston

Aug 5th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Hopefully…

Texas Medical Center data released Tuesday suggests the latest wave of COVID-19 might have reached its peak in the Houston area, though several key metrics used to track the virus remain high.

The medical center’s weekly data report shows that COVID-19 hospitalizations, the positivity rate of coronaviruus tests and the amount of virus detected at the city of Houston’s wastewater treatment plants all trended downward for the second straight week. Those trends indicate the Houston area has likely crested the peak of a recent surge caused by the extremely contagious BA.5 subvariant, said Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.

“All the numbers are pointing to the fact that we’ve peaked maybe a week, a week and a half ago,” McDeavitt said. “I fully expect we will continue to trend down over the next several weeks.”

The line graphs from the TMC show a mountain range of peaks from prior waves of COVID-19, such as those caused by the delta and omicron variants. The latest BA.5 wave shows that after several weeks of steady climbing, the line is finally on the descent.

During previous waves, the virus did not pick up steam again after the numbers started to trend downward, McDeavitt said. He expects the same trajectory from BA.5.

It appears the current wave has at least reached a plateau, said Dr. Ashley Drews, an infectious disease specialist at Houston Methodist. The fact that the key metrics have stabilized is an encouraging sign, she said.

“We’re cautiously optimistic that things are turning in the right direction, and we’re going down,” Drews said.

[…]

During the week of July 25, TMC hospitals admitted an average of 219 patients with COVID-19 per day. That’s down from an average of 226 during the week of July 18, and 240 during the week of July 11.

However, the numbers remain much higher than they were before the emergence of BA.5. Three months ago, TMC hospitals admitted an average of 80 patients per day.

The good news is that the percentage of patients who need to be treated in an ICU remains lower than prior surges of COVID-19.

Last week, less than 14 percent of the 912 patients admitted with COVID-19 were treated in an ICU, according to TMC data. That’s lower than the percentage of patients treated in an ICU at the peaks of the omicron wave (17 percent) and the delta wave (22 percent).

[…]

The amount of virus detected at the city of Houston’s wastewater treatment plants, which has been a reliable indicator of community spread, also fell for the second straight week.

Wastewater loads reached an all-time high during the week of July 11, at 927 percent higher than a baseline established in June 2020. That fell to 774 percent during the week of July 18, and to 725 percent over the past week.

The amount of virus in the wastewater is still much higher than before the recent surge. Three months ago, it was less than 100 percent higher than the June 2020 baseline.

So, the data is starting to go in the right direction, which is good. But there’s still a lot of COVID out there, and all of the levels are still a lot higher than they were before the wave began, even if they never approached the heights of the previous peaks, and that’s bad. You should still be exercising caution, which is to say wearing your mask and avoiding indoor crowds if you can. And of course, get vaxxed and boosted as needed. We may be back on the downswing, but there’s no reason to believe we won’t trend up again at some point, and we’ve still got a ways to go to get to the lower levels we want.

Fifth Circuit tosses mask mandate lawsuit filed by disability rights activists

Jul 30th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Par for the course.

A federal appeals court on Monday tossed out a lower-court injunction, issued in November, that would have allowed public schools in Texas to ignore Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates.

U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel of Austin had blocked Abbott’s order as it pertained to schools, ruling that a ban on mandatory face masks improperly endangered students with disabilities and violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by denying them the opportunity to participate equally in school.

Texas appealed, and a month later the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked enforcement of Yeakel’s injunction while it considered the state’s case.

On Monday, in a 2-1 ruling, the appeals court sided with state officials, tossing out Yeakel’s injunction and dismissing the lawsuit by the students. The court said the students did not prove that the ban on mask mandates put them at imminent and concrete risk of contracting COVID-19.

“In light of widely available vaccines and the schools’ other mitigation efforts, the odds of any particular plaintiff contracting COVID-19 and subsequently suffering complications are speculative,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Don Willett. Both were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

In addition, Oldham wrote, the Americans with Disabilities Act only ensures that students have access to school, not that they have access to their desired accommodation of universal masking.

“Schools, in turn, have numerous alternatives for mitigating the risks of COVID-19 so plaintiffs have such access. The schools can adopt policies regarding vaccines, plexiglass, hand sanitizer, social distancing, and more,” Oldham wrote. “Plaintiffs have not even attempted to show that one or any combination of these accommodations is insufficient to mitigate the risks of COVID-19 to a level low enough that plaintiffs can attend school.”

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Eugene Davis complained that Oldham mischaracterized the students’ argument by saying they merely feared an increased risk of contracting COVID-19. Instead, the students argued that state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s dogged defense of Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, including lawsuits against school districts and threats of additional litigation, amounted to disability discrimination.

The students also proved that they had been, or will be, harmed by a ban on all mask mandates, even at schools that determine that limited mask orders were a reasonable accommodation for student health, he wrote.

“While all students bear some health risks by attending school in person during the ongoing pandemic, the district court found, and it is undisputed, that these plaintiffs face a much higher risk to their health because of their disabilities,” said Davis, appointed by former President Ronald Reagan.

See here for the previous update, and here for a copy of the opinion. There are still a lot of state lawsuits over the Abbott executive order that banned mask mandates in school, which largely turn on the question of what the Governor’s authority under the 1975 Texas Disaster Act is; the San Antonio ISD vaccine mandate lawsuit is in that same bucket. This was a federal lawsuit that claimed discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. I still think they had a pretty good argument, but it’s the Fifth Circuit, what are you gonna do? I suppose an appeal to SCOTUS is possible, but perhaps not advisable, as it’s probably not a good idea to give them a chance to mess with that law. Texas Public Radio and the ABA Journal have more.

SAISD vaccine mandate upheld again

Jul 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Also still on hold, but the state loses again at the appellate level.

A state appellate court upheld San Antonio Independent School District’s authority Wednesday to mandate its workers get vaccinated against COVID-19, almost a year after the district instituted the requirement for all staff to help stem the spread of the virus.

The 4th Court of Appeals on Wednesday denied Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request to overturn a Bexar County judge’s decision not to grant the state a temporary injunction to block the staff vaccine mandate. Judge Mary Lou Alvarez of the 45th District Court issued that ruling in October, allowing SAISD to continue enforcing the mandate.

The court also ordered that the costs of the appeal be assessed against the state.

Paxton filed a lawsuit against SAISD in September, after first suing the district over the mandate in August because the vaccine had not been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. The August lawsuit was dropped after the FDA approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

The lawsuit has wound its way through the state court system over the past year. Paxton’s office appealed Alvarez’s ruling to the 4th Court of Appeals and also requested the appellate court temporarily block the mandate while it considered Paxton’s appeal. The attorney general then requested the state Supreme Court step in and halt the mandate, which it did in mid-October.

The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling forced SAISD to stop enforcing the mandate while the 4th Court of Appeals considered the state’s appeal of the temporary injunction that Alvarez denied.

[…]

Paxton’s lawsuit argued that SAISD’s vaccine mandate violated Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order prohibiting governmental entities from implementing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, which the governor claimed he had the authority to do under the Texas Disaster Act. Attorneys for SAISD challenged that reasoning, contending the Act does not give the governor the power to suspend all state laws.

Wednesday’s ruling by the 4th Court of Appeals determined that the Texas Disaster Act does not give Abbott the authority to suspend parts of the Education Code that allow school districts to issue vaccine mandates.

“The Texas Disaster Act expressly limits the Governor’s commander-in-chief authority to state agencies, state boards, and state commissions having emergency responsibilities,” the ruling states. “The District is not a state agency, a state board, or a state commission. Rather, the Texas Disaster Act defines the District as a ‘local government entity.’”

See here for the previous update. This sounds like a solid ruling, one that SCOTx ought to uphold, though who knows what they’ll actually do. It would also be written on sand to some extent, in that if the Republicans retain full control of government next year they’ll just amend the Texas Disaster Act to make it cover school districts and/or explicitly exclude anything having to do with vaccinations. In the meantime, even though the policy remains on hold during the litigation, it’s surely the case that the mandate got some holdouts vaccinated during the period while it was in effect. That will always be a win, no matter what happens from here.

The current state of the hospitals

Jul 21st, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Worse than before, but not nearly as bad as before that.

A small but growing share of Houston healthcare workers are calling in sick with COVID, exacerbating long-running staffing issues at some hospitals amid the virus’s resurgence.

But despite spreading infections, medical leaders say the Houston-area healthcare system is managing this wave better than previous bouts with the virus, pointing to better therapeutics and fewer COVID patients requiring critical care.

Anecdotally, doctors say at least half of all COVID patients were admitted for reasons unrelated to the virus. While wastewater data reflects a soaring infection rate, daily new hospitalizations are climbing at a slower pace compared to the record-breaking omicron wave in January and February, according to Texas Medical Center data.

“I don’t anticipate we’re going to have major operational problems” among medical center hospitals, said Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.

The latest Texas Medical Center data, published Tuesday, show hospitalizations have nearly doubled over the last five weeks, from 121 in early June to 240 last week. In January, it took only five weeks for omicron to spark a nearly 600 percent increase in daily COVID hospitalizations, as admissions jumped from 74 to a record 515, according to TMC data.

Meanwhile, the increasing viral load detected in the city’s wastewater — 927 percent higher last week than July 2020 — appears to be as high as ever. Two weeks ago, the viral load was 843 percent of the July 2020 baseline. The citywide positivity rate also saw a slight increase from 29 percent two weeks ago to 31 percent last week, while the positivity rate in the medical center dropped slightly from 16.1 percent to 15.9 percent.

[…]

The number of sick hospital staff members reflects a small portion of the overall workforce at Houston hospitals. On Monday, Houston Methodist reported 402 staff members — 1.4 percent of all employees — had tested positive for COVID. Harris Health System said 245 staff members, or 2.4 percent of its workforce, had tested positive for COVID so far this July, compared to roughly 90 staff members throughout most of June.

Additionally, spokespeople for Memorial Hermann Health System, Texas Children’s Hospital and HCA Houston Healthcare say they are not experiencing major staffing issues or operational interruptions amid the current surge.

“Because of our vaccination and booster requirements, our staffing across hospitals is robust and fully intact,” said Dr. James Versalovic, chief pathologist at Texas Children’s Hospital. “I’m happy to say, we have prepared ourselves for this moment.”

More than two years into the pandemic, medical leaders now greet surges with more nuanced messaging, showing concern over rising infections and staffing struggles while assuring the public that hospitals are now better equipped to withstand rising infections.

Versalovic noted that Texas Children’s has seen its COVID population double over the last month. The 7-day rolling average of pediatric COVID patients is now more than 50 in the hospital system. He urged parents to seek out vaccinations as the start of school closes in.

On the one hand, this is basically good news. The hospitals are able to function without being overburdened, our overall vaccination level (and the good luck that this variant, however more contagious it is, isn’t particularly devastating) is helping keep levels in check, and while we’re worse off than we were a couple of months ago we’re much better off than we were in previous waves. One could argue that this is more or less what “endemic” looks like.

On the other hand, Stace is right. We’ve basically given up on trying to keep a lid on this thing – to be sure, there’s far less that governments can do now, thanks to a bunch of wingnut court rulings and Greg Abbott executive orders, but there are plenty of things we could be doing that we aren’t. A lot of leaders who should know better aren’t setting good examples. Even a milder form of COVID is potentially deadly to people with various comorbidities and risk factors, or who are immunocompromised in some way. Just having people mask up again as a matter of course would make all of their lives better, but we’re not doing that.

I’m definitely masking in indoor spaces again, but I’m also willing to be in indoor spaces, and to be among groups of people. I’ve mitigated some of my risk, but I’m engaging in riskier behavior than I had been before. It’s one part denial, one part pandemic fatigue, one part the perhaps naive hope that there will be another booster coming soon, and one part hoping that I’m being cautious enough. I don’t know what happens next if things do get worse from here. I very much hope I don’t have to find out.

There’s no cheap housing in Houston any more

Jul 18th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

What are we going to do about that?

In the sprawling Houston region, those who could not afford homeownership in the city’s urban core always had options. They could trade proximity for affordability.

But as rising home prices and mortgage rates push homeownership further out of reach for the average renter, the suburbs within Harris County are losing their reputation as an affordable haven, said Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research — just one example of how access to homeownership and quality housing has grown more difficult over the past decade, with challenges accelerating during the pandemic.

The Kinder Institute and Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released Tuesday morning their annual reports on the state of housing in the Houston area and the nation. Together, they painted a picture of a deepening divide between the prospects of current homeowners, whose equity has been buoyed by record-breaking home price appreciation, and renters, who have seen the monthly costs of buying a home rise far more quickly than wages.

The median-priced home in the suburbs of Clear Lake and Jersey Village, for example, were priced between $162,000 and $175,000 in 2011, according to the Houston Association of Realtors. They now go for $300,000 to $317,000.

“You have to go farther and farther out until you find a home that’s affordable,” explained Stephen Sherman, a researcher at the Kinder Institute. “The whole saying is drive until you qualify. We’re finding that people will have to drive even more” — a development which will have rippling implications on traffic and the way floodwaters drain.

And no matter how far out you look, it’s difficult to find a home priced below $200,000 in Harris County these days, where the median home price is on track to soon surpass that in Houston, according to the Kinder report.

Nationwide, four million renters in the past year have been priced out from buying homes, the Joint Center for Housing Studies report found. That’s a concern, said Daniel T. McCue, senior research associate at the center, because “if the door is closing on homeownership, it would lock in some significant inequities in housing.”

[…]

Home prices have outpaced incomes because of a confluence of issues including the chronic underbuilding of homes (the building of which has failed to keep up with population growth for years), the increased demand for homes as millennials enter the homebuying market, surging construction costs as the pandemic interrupted supply chains around the country and the fact that most new construction is focused on the high end of the market.

“Suburban Houston — and new homes in suburban Houston — used to be extremely affordable,” said Lawrence Dean, the Houston regional director for Zonda, which does market research related to new home construction. Since then, the costs of land, materials and labor have all shot up. These days, it’s near impossible to build a home for less than $200,000, he explained.

Wood, fiber-cement siding and even land that’s ready for new homes became harder to come by and labor became scarce during the pandemic. According to the federal government’s producer price index, which measures the average change in selling prices, residential construction materials saw costs rise more than 30 percent in January 2022 from March 2020, when the pandemic began to disrupt businesses in the United States.

The Kinder report is here. This is a regional problem, but it’s also a national problem. It’s partly pandemic-induced, and so may ease up a bit over time, but it’s also driven by other factors, including some lasting effects of the pandemic such as working from home. The point about housing within the city of Houston now being generally less expensive than in the non-Houston parts of Harris County is interesting, as a lot of the population growth in the unincorporated areas has been driven by affordable housing. We’re still cheaper than many other parts of the country (though not by as much now) so some of that will continue, but some of it will be pushed into other counties, and perhaps some of it will come back within the city of Houston. I’d like to see what the demographers think about that.

In the meantime, this is a real problem for a lot of people, and it’s going to take some big ideas to fix. Which, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t exactly fill me with hope. The abundance of available land, the lack of restrictions on building, and the general attractiveness of Texas as a place to live has been a huge driver of growth in the area. What do we do when the first two aren’t making a difference and the third is no longer true?

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