Three weeks after the Governor of the US State of Texas announced an end to all Coronavirus lockdown restrictions, including the mandatory use of facemasks, and two weeks after those measures took effect, cases of Covid are still falling in the Lone Star state.
In the first week of March, when the announcement was made that all restrictions would be lifted, Texas was averaging over 7,000 cases per day. Now, three weeks later (two weeks of which have been mask, and lockdown free) Texas is averaging 3,898 cases per day.
If the raw case numbers still seem high to you, remember that Texas is home to some 29 million people. 4,000 cases a day in Texas would equate to about 615 cases per day in Ireland.
Over the past two days, Ireland has reported 520 and 769 cases, respectively. So basically, we’re doing roughly the same number of cases as Texas is – with the exception that Ireland has a full level five lockdown, and Texas has no restrictions of any kind.
But John, you say, there are important differences between Texas and Ireland. And indeed, reader, there are. Let’s go through them:
The weather, of course, is the biggest difference. Texas is a lot warmer on average than Ireland is. If there is anything at all to be said for the proposition that covid occurs more in cooler, damper weather, then you’d expect us to have more difficulty. Except, of course, for two things: First, the weather hasn’t been that bad here recently. Second, good weather didn’t really stop sunny places like Texas and Florida from racking up massive case numbers during the height of the pandemic.
Another difference – by far the biggest, actually – is the vaccination programme. Texas has administered a vaccine (at least one shot) to 21.8%% of its people. In Ireland, the number is…. a lot less than that. That has got to be making some difference.
The other difference, of course, is political culture. The Governor of Texas is in a relatively sweet political spot, in that if this all goes wrong for him, he can probably just get into a shouting match with Joe Biden about who’s to blame. If cases suddenly surge in the next few weeks (and you’d be a fool to rule that out, which is why we’re keeping an eye on it, here at Gript) then Republican voters will blame the Democratic President, and Democratic voters will blame the Republican Governor.
In Ireland, by contrast, if things go wrong, everybody blames Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. It’s deserved, but its also a sort of national sport.
Irish politicians are much more loathe to remove restrictions because they fear being blamed for a surge of deaths by a media which is quite content, overall, with lockdown, and likes the Government to err on the side of caution.
In Texas, the political culture is very different, and, unsurprisingly, so are the political decisions.
You’d like to think that if the current trend in Texas continues, that should precipitate an end to facemasks and lockdowns across the western world. But don’t count on it.
Anyway, we’ll keep these reports up, once a week, until the trend becomes clearer. So far, though, those who predicted a Texan disaster are being disappointed.