It’s been just over a month since Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas would be lifting its mask mandate and allowing businesses to open fully.
The order did “not abandon safe practices that Texans have mastered over the past year,” Abbott said, and businesses could still limit capacity or require safety protocols.
Most companies are, in fact, doing just that. The question is whether that’s good enough.
The Texas Rangers invited a full house for Monday’s Opening Day, a decision that President Joe Biden called “a mistake” and “not responsible.” But at least the baseball club required masks and other precautions.
Indeed, 87% of Texas executives said their companies still require employees to wear masks and 73% said they require customers to mask up, too, according to a survey conducted March 16-24 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The responses varied slightly by industry sector, but overall, they indicated a commitment to protecting against COVID-19.
“We are still maintaining strict limited access to our facility, internal masking, social distancing, temperature monitoring of employees and guests, questionnaires and hand sanitation,” a food manufacturing executive told the Dallas Fed. “Given the governor’s ‘open up’ command, spring break and the influx of COVID-positive people into Texas, we will maintain this and revisit this policy in 45 days.”
There’s reason to be cautious, just as there’s reason to be optimistic. The latest COVID-19 forecast for Dallas-Fort Worth, released Monday by UT Southwestern Medical Center, warns of rising visits to emergency rooms and more contagious virus variants from the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
In public places in D-FW, roughly 10% to 20% more people are going without masks, and there’s been a sharp increase in time spent with others and traffic to retailers and recreation centers, the report shows.
But COVID-19 hospitalizations have been trending lower for three months and were down 21% in Dallas County over the last two weeks. Just over 1 in 4 Texans also has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, and the vaccination campaign is gearing up as supplies increase.
“Our case trajectory still depends heavily on both our behavior and our collective success in vaccinating North Texas,” the UT Southwestern report said.
To protect public health, especially for those not yet vaccinated, people must continue to wear masks, maintain physical distance and practice other measures recommended by health experts, the report said.
“We can’t go back to normal just yet,” said Dr. Mujeeb Basit, assistant professor of internal medicine and cardiology at UT Southwestern. “It’s on the horizon — when we get significantly more people vaccinated. We’re not quite there.”
The primary concern, he said, is the increase in people going to large gatherings because those can turn into superspreader events. If the virus is replicating at a rapid rate in the community, there’s greater risk of developing a variant that can escape the vaccines.
Basit pointed to big surges in India and Brazil, and recently at three ski resorts in Canada. At one Canadian resort, over 80% of cases were among young adults, and the most common locations for transmission were in households and social gatherings, according to local health authorities.
“I think we’re putting our guard down a little too soon,” Basit said.
Many employers are holding the line, especially about working remotely, according to mobility trends compiled by Google and included in the UT Southwestern report.
Visits to parks remain much higher than before the pandemic and time spent at home remains elevated, as you would expect. One key metric — trips to the workplace — is still at low levels. In Dallas County, such trips were 34% below the pre-pandemic baseline. In Collin County, that measure was 40% below baseline.
Employers are not in a hurry to get workers back into the office, certainly not at the risk of sparking a COVID-19 outbreak.
“People have worked really hard to get to a stable place where they can work effectively from home,” Basit said. “The companies we’ve talked to are saying, ‘Look, we’ve found a happy place where we can be productive and get our work done.’
“They’re taking it very cautiously,” Basit said about returning to work.
Ironically, the bigger COVID-19 threat is probably outside the office. In contact tracing at schools, transmission was often linked to outside activities such as parties, he said. When workplaces start bringing back more employees, he worries about viral transmission in social settings.
“Mass gatherings outside of work are even more important” than the risk from on-the-job duties, Basit said.
There is a balancing act between the economic concerns of companies and their employees and the threat to public health. Many people are taking personal responsibility for their own health and helping to contain the virus by wearing masks in public and maintaining physical distance. And the ultimate act of personal responsibility is getting a vaccine when you get the chance.
But for businesses, Basit noted the costs of reopening too soon or too widely. There’s an impact on public health, including the risk of a growing number of young people developing chronic conditions from COVID-19. The business can be set back, too.
The cruise line industry, which was hit so hard in the early days of the pandemic, has tried to get going again. It invested in a wide range of precautions, but the timing wasn’t right because the virus wasn’t under control.
“Restarting is expensive, and sputtered restarts are really difficult for an industry,” Basit said.
