Texas and Mississippi: Dropping the Masks

Texas and Mississippi governors announced yesterday that the mask mandates were going to end: Mississippi today and Texas March 10. Texas is also going to open business up 100%. In regards to the masks, I don’t think that is a good idea and in regards to businesses, it’s a damn if you do and damn if you don’t. There is no easy solution for people sustaining themselves during this pandemic.

The masks, though, we can still keep the mask mandates. They are not killing us; the coronavirus is killing us.

Let’s look at how Texas has been faring lately with the coronavirus.

The case counts come from Wikipedia and hospitalization and deaths come from Covid Tracking Project.

The section with bars colored in pink represents the week of that polar vortex sending Texas into a crisis of failing power and its knock on effects of lack of water and food. A total failure of the free market system in the energy sector. The dip in case counts and death counts is just reflecting Texas in survival mode. No power means an inability to transmit data for reporting purposes. The numbers went back up probably to catch up in the reporting.

The case counts have dropped significantly but they are not at the lows as in September after the summer surge – not quite yet. Hospitalization and deaths are still higher than the levels seen in September/October. Texas hasn’t reset to the base level before the fall surge and now we must deal with the new variants that are supposed to be way more contagious. Texas has some UK variant (at about 101 cases), and while not the worst, Texas places 7th in the number of UK variants. I would think the state would want to be at levels before the fall surge began before doing away with the mask mandate. During the summer and into the fall, I believe Texas was under the mask mandate, even at case levels below today’s level so I don’t understand why the governor would drop the mask mandate.

I won’t talk about opening businesses up 100% because there is just no optimal solution.

But I will say that the elimination of the coronavirus rules feel like hand waving to distract the attention from the abysmal failure of their energy system. Instead of focusing attention on their problem with their free market energy system, the politicians are focusing on the “good news” that their numbers have dramatically fallen, so everyone can go about their business, just like before the pandemic.

Next week I’ll take another snapshot of the Texas statistics and then we’ll see what happens. Hopefully the people of Texas will be smarter (but if they have voted in Ken Paxton again even under the optics of seeming corruption or voted in Ted Cruz even after his nihilistic behavior during federal budgeting or debt level negotiations, then I don’t have much faith in Texas’ citizens).

Let’s look at Mississippi.

Again, the pink bars represent the week of the polar vortex. Mississippi was not reported to have the same level of problems during that winter event but the case counts and death counts did dip during that week and they appear to have gone back up slightly. That seems to be a rebound from the effect of that week.

The cases and the death counts seem to be almost at the level of September/October before its own fall surge. Hospitalization seem to have gone down to the level before fall. Maybe Mississippi is in a better position than Texas, but with the new contagious variants, do we really want them to risk with the elimination of the mask mandate?

I just looked at the number of new variants in Mississippi and that state has only 1 so it appears they are in a better position in regards to the new variants.

I don’t know. I’ll have to see how the numbers transpire as time goes by. Maybe the fears about the new variants are overblown; however, UK was hurting badly until the country instituted a lockdown – I believe it was a full blown lockdown. That is not something Texas or Mississippi want to do.

And the last thing, here are some maps which give a bird’s eye view of the statistics. These data come from the John Hopkins University as noted in the Sources of Data box listed above.