Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Texas, Our (Diseased) Texas


He prefers, instead, to blame the youths:

He said there are also reasons for why Tuesday's new case count was so high: tests results coming from an assisted living facility near Plano; a county south of Austin where positive cases seemed to be reported in batches; and 104 cases in one East Texas county that appear to be primarily from tests at a prison.

But he also pointed to uncareful behavior as a possible driver in some of the new cases. Abbott said there were a number of counties where a majority of those who tested positive for the coronavirus were under the age of 30, which he attributed to people going to "bar-type" settings or Memorial Day celebrations and not taking health precautions.
Gee, Governor, and who opened those bars, hmmm?

But the purpose of the press conference was to say Texas has plenty of hospital beds available, so come on down!  No, I'm not making that up, either, although Abbott seems to have referenced the hospital bed report rather than really relied on it. 

Let's look at the numbers:

The total number of beds in Texas is 54,844.  14,993 of those are available right now.  Then again, Texas is a big state.  It's 746 miles (by car) from Houston to El Paso.  Hospital beds in either city ain't much good to people not in that city, right?  Dallas/Fort Worth has 24% of its beds available.  Houston has 21% available.  But Houston has two "public" hospitals that will take people without insurance.  One of those hospitals is full, per a report on local news last night.

Number of beds "available," in other words, doesn't necessarily mean "available."  And frankly, the way cases are spiking in Texas, 21% available seems pretty damned slim, especially as the number of cases increases, and the number going to hospital beds increases as well.  We're not fat, dumb, and happy, with an abundance of capacity:  we're sawing the branch off we're sitting on, while the Governor tells us it's our fault for going to bars in the first place.  But at the same time, we can't even ask people to wear masks in public.  (Abbott keeps talking about people being jailed for not wearing a mask; Harris County, the most populous in Texas, was simply going to hand people masks and ask them to put it on.  Next Abbott will claim the counties want to take away the hospitals.)

There are spikes in:  Tyler (27% of beds available), the Valley (23% of beds available) and Austin (28% available).  It really won't take much to make those available beds become "not available."  If Houston runs their capacity down to almost nothing, what do they do?  Ship people off to Dallas, 400 miles away?  To Austin?  To Tyler?

This is not governance, this is abdication of responsibility.  Besides, if the numbers are spiking because of a prison in East Texas, that doesn't mean those people aren't infected and contagious, and that the contagion won't spread.  Abbott is one press conference away from saying that if we didn't do so much testing, we wouldn't know about the number of cases.

Damned young people and their bars!
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