A Texas-size reopening has many wondering: too much or not enough
HOUSTON — Texas pushed its way out of a statewide coronavirus lockdown on Friday, a wide-ranging reopening of restaurants, businesses and beaches amid a continuing outbreak that still left at least one local official hoping for even more.
Texas, the largest Republican-led state in the country is embarking down a politically charged path filled with uncertainty and public health risks. The state ended its stay-at-home order weeks before some of the benchmark epidemiological models suggested doing so and shifted its focus to restoring a $1.8 trillion economy that has suffered from the spread of the virus and plummeting oil prices.
The top infectious-disease experts in the state have been split on the partial reopening, with some saying that the scale of the state’s testing and contact-tracing system is still inadequate. They point to models developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, which caution that the state should wait until mid-June to relax social distancing.
“There isn’t a perfect game plan out there that’s evidence-based and proven for reopening a society in the midst of a pandemic,” said Dr. David L. Lakey, a former Texas health commissioner who helped oversee the Ebola crisis in Dallas in 2014 and is now the chief medical officer for the University of Texas System.
The reopening was a complex, muddled and scattershot endeavor in the second-largest state by area and by population. Abbott’s move superseded all local orders, angering many city and county leaders and adding to the confusion.
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