46 days ago, Texas opened "100%" with no statewide mask mandate, 8 days after @GregAbbott_TX announced the new policy.
Blue checkmarks predicted the apocalypse.
It's now undeniably been long enough to declare that the apocalypse did not arrive. Instead, everything is better.
Since March 10th, when Texas reopened 100% with no statewide mask mandate...
✅Cases: DOWN 25.4%
✅Hospitalizations: DOWN 39.1%
✅% of beds used by COVID patients: DOWN 36.6%
✅% of patients that are COVID+: DOWN 35.2%
✅COVID ICU: DOWN 38.8%
✅Deaths through April 11: DOWN 70.4%
Cases (7-day statewide average per day) are:
✅Down 25.4% since Texas reopened 100% without a statewide mask mandate.
✅Down 50.6% since @GovAbbott made his announcement.
✅Down 88.2% since the January peak.
Latitudinal seasonality, folks.
Zooming out to the entirety of 2021, it's clear that "cases" are substantially down and have remained down for several weeks.
Today, Texas reported the fewest number of hospital patients testing positive for COVID-19 since June 15, 2020.
✅Down 39.1% since Texas reopened 100% without a statewide mask mandate.
✅Down 51.3% since @GovAbbott made his announcement.
✅Down 81.1% since the January peak.
Today, Texas reported the lowest percentage of hospital beds in use by COVID-19 positive patients (4.14%) since June 13, 2020.
✅Down 36.6% since Texas reopened 100% without a statewide mask mandate.
Today, Texas reached various lows dating to Summer 2020.
✅Hospitalized: June 15
✅Patients to Beds: June 13
✅COVID Patients to All Patients: June 13
✅COVID Patients to All Patients ( 7 day avg.): June 17
✅ICU: June 13
✅ICU (7-day avg.): June 16
✅Deaths (7-day avg.): June 13
46 days is plenty of time for blue-checkmark predicted doom to arrive.
It did not arrive.
COVID's future reemergence in Texas, or lack thereof, will have zero to do with mandates, rules, regulations, plexiglass, masks, or stickers on the ground that tell you where to stand.
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Woke rot in Texas government schools is far more pervasive and systemic than almost anyone will admit. It goes both deep and wide. Urban, rural, and suburban. Libraries. Curriculum. Teachers. Administrators. Don’t go down that rabbit hole if you want to imagine the kids are okay.
If you do any searching of your local school's library, you'll definitely find tons of weird porny graphic novels and embarrassingly cringe woke toddler books and such. But it's more than just a handful of books "slipping through the cracks," it's a relentlessly one-sided bias.
The top school district in Texas, @EanesISD, has its library catalogue online, and, sure, the activist books and sexual content books are disturbing, but it is also amazing what is missing.
If not having a book is a "ban," Eanes I.S.D. librarians are Bowdlerizing aficionados.
In late November of 2018, San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, Jr. asserted that "strict enforcement of universal masking" in his city had cut short the usual course of Spanish Flu by weeks and prevented widespread death.
Recently, a Baby Boomer extended relative shared this "Do's and Don't's for Influenza Prevention" list from the November 15, 1918 edition of the Douglas Island News in Alaska, with the suggestion that this advice is somehow... good. You can find it here: newspapers.com/clip/47051883/
1918 was a lot like 2020. A lot of folks were very willing to try out masks in response to a deadly virus (Spanish Flu was *far* worse than COVID).
Masks were mandated in very few places in 1918. The rationale for masks in 1918 was personal protection, not societal protection.
By the 1919-1921 timeframe, a strong consensus had formed against masks.
I've taken a serious deep dive into documents and newspapers from the Spanish Flu era to get a sense of what was going on. A few things stand out.
Last year in the U.S. broadly and Texas more specifically, some schools were mask-optional. Other schools forced or coerced children to wear them for hours each day, every day, often even outside during exercise.
Forced-mask schools had higher infection rates than mask-optional.
In U.S. schools, staff in forced-mask schools had higher COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) infection rates than those in mask-optional schools.
In real-world data, rather than wish-casting, hunches, or theoretical models, forced-mask schools had higher infection rates for both students and staff.
Texas, from January peaks to latest data:
- COVID hospitalizations down 19.9%
- COVID patients % of capacity down 22.9%
- COVID patients % of all patients down 27.7%
- COVID patients down 21.4%
- COVID ICU patients down 17.2%
- All ICU patients down 11.7%
Divided into quartiles, the more school districts were remote rather than in-person in 2020-21, the worse they did on reading and math tests.
In every category of STAAR Test achievement (Masters, Meets, Approaches, or Did Not Meet Grade Level), in every subject, in every grade, the more remote school districts had worse learning loss than the more in-person school districts.