"We're Not Going to Shut Texas Down Again"

As WH says they’ll pull federal support for covid testing centers, @JohnCornyn asks him to reconsider: “ I think it’s clear to all of us, that with the uptick of cases, now is not a time to retreat from our vigilance in testing.” pic.twitter.com/TeLwmvD071

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) June 24, 2020

John Cornyn is facing re-election.  Can you tell?

"But Texans need to shut down again."

“[B]ecause the spread is so rampant right now, there’s never a reason for you to have to leave your home,” Abbott told the people he had just promised a rapid return to normal life. “Unless you do need to go out, the safest place for you is at your home.”

I don't know the economics of the restaurant/bar business, but I know margins are pretty thin.  A full house guarantees an ROI, a light crowd means it's costing you more to be open than it's worth.  I did work in a bookstore in my last retail gig, only a few years back now, and I know there were some Saturdays when we'd have made more money by closing than staying open, and we only had two staff members making part-time minimum wage level pay.  Now factor in the costs of firing up ovens and ranges and making messes in the kitchen somebody else needs to come in and clean up, and you get the idea of why you need customers to make it all worthwhile.

But how do you have customers and not have customers?  Abbott is still telling us all to stay home and out of the bars and restaurants, even as he says they should reopen.  How does this work, exactly?

And as of June 30 we won't have any more testing so we won't know how many cases of covid-19 we have.  Well, except for the patients in the hospital beds, which will probably be diagnosed with our without confirmatory testing (or insurance/Medicare will pay for it, the same way we paid for the polio vaccine in my childhood.  Oh, wait, no we didn't!  The federal government paid for that so we'd all be protected.  This is progress?)

And yeah, there's a massive Catch-22 of Republican stupidity here:

For instance, staff at retail stores and restaurants that forced to closed by lockdown restrictions are eligible for unemployment checks. By lifting those restrictions and ordering people back to work, Republicans can now kick those folks off unemployment. The fact that the “jobs” they’re going back to could well evaporate due to lack of business, doesn’t matter to Republicans. They just want folks off the unemployment rolls and really don’t care what happens to them after that.

The catch here is that the unemployment checks created a far more effective economic stimulus than the cut-rate paychecks people are being sent back to. If Republicans really wanted a recovery, they’d be keeping people on a healthy unemployment income until it’s truly economically feasible to return to work again, because then those people would be able to keep on buying food, paying the bills and otherwise contributing to the consumer spending needed to keep the economy afloat. But Republicans would honestly rather watch the economy slowly wither than increase social spending and taxes the rich.

The economy's just gonna get worse, and shit's just gonna get more real.  No wonder Trump and Gaetz would rather talk about statues and Jordan would rather talk about masks. We need to talk about taking government back so it serves the people, not some idiotic idea.

Meanwhile:

Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN’s John Berman that the current situation in Texas represents the “greatest public health failure in the history of the nation,” and he warned that it will spiral out of control very quickly.

“We’re seeing a very steep acceleration in the number of cases here in Houston, in our metro areas, as you pointed out, and also in San Antonio and Austin,” he said. “And it’s not just an increase in the number of cases, it’s the slope, the way it’s accelerating. It’s almost vertical. This is what we call an exponential rise, meaning it’s been flat for a while and now it’s going up almost vertically.”

Hotez then said that the state should consider going back into full lockdown to get the spread of the virus back under control.

“If it were up to me, we would do exactly what we did towards the end of March, which is a full — implement a full lockdown and social distancing,” he said. “That’s the only way that I see that we’re going to start to bring those numbers down.”

Always darkest before it goes completely black.  Maybe blaming people in bars will still work.  Or just telling people not to go out after all, even though the stores and bars and restaurants are open.