I just saw recent news of the Texas governor lifting a mask use mandate and all restrictions on businesses, as of a week from now, March 10. Rather than get into what had been restricted and how effective that had been, and what should be done instead, I just wanted to compare that to the reaction to the pandemic in Germany.
A friend lives in Germany and he complains about strict limitations restricting his options, in cases when those seem to not tie back to functional effectiveness. I don't think he is critical of the functional steps (school closures, public gathering restrictions, some degree of business closure, requirement to wear masks, etc.), it's the parts that don't seem well thought out that bother him, like restricting public park access at some times.
It was strange seeing even Fox News run this story from the critical side, not taking their own stand on it being a bad decision, but instead running the story from the angle of the governor of California criticizing the decision:
Newsom blasts Abbott for removing Texas mask mandate: 'Absolutely reckless'
By not framing that as a criticism they clearly accept they can be critical of the move without actually taking a side, since many of their conservative viewers will support dropping any and all pandemic protection measures. CNN took a more direct and critical stance:
There's no need for me to add much more background or my own opinion; I wanted to pass on a quick look at how the pandemic impact stats compare between Texas and Germany.
Google informs that the population of Texas is 29 million, and Germany is 83 million, so the per-day stats for new cases or deaths being comparable would relate to Texas having nearly a three times higher level or both types of impact per-person. Let's take a look, based on Google's corona virus tracker dashboard:
To keep this simple it might work to focus mostly on the current 7-day average for comparison, now standing at 7,259 cases in Texas.
With a current 7 day average of 8,114 new cases per day Germany is on the order of 10% higher new case stats than Texas (11.8% higher), but factoring in nearly three times higher population level there is no comparison; Texas impact is much, much higher. But maybe deaths tell a different story, so there isn't as much concern as there might seem:
232 deaths per day as a 7-day average in Texas, versus 306 in Germany, again on the order of a 2 1/2 times higher per population death rate in Texas.
Maybe it's that vaccinations have been so widespread that the risk seems offset by that. Per the CNN article:
As of Monday, 6.57% of Texans have been fully vaccinated, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Abbott said Tuesday 5.7 million vaccine shots have been administered in the state, there is a surplus of personal protective equipment (PPE) and "10 million Texans have recovered from Covid."
Good they they have some PPE on hand. There is a pretty good chance that health care workers and some of the highest risk residents were vaccinated first, since that's how the vaccination rollout is working across the US in general. But 6.57% of residents being fully vaccinated (receiving both shots of versions designed for two treatments, no doubt) isn't that high a stat, and it's hard to place how relevant it is that a third of the state is known to have had covid already.
Except that the Google dashboard indicates that there were 2.67 million known cases of corona virus in Texas, not ten million, based on Johns Hopkins data. Why would the governor be citing a number four times higher than the known cases? It does seem probable that there are very significant numbers of cases that remained unknown, but it also seems probable that this factor of 4 estimate is pulled out of thin air.
The Mayor of Austin is quoted in that CNN article as objecting to this move:
Austin Mayor Steve Adler told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night that everyone in the city was "just dumbfounded" over Abbott's announcement.
"It's mind-boggling, given where we are," Adler said. He said that they have worked so hard to "get at the risk" of Covid-19 in the city and Travis County.
It's hard to imagine that just as occurred back after Thanksgiving and Christmas in the US, related to increased travel, a new spike in cases and deaths won't occur in Texas.
My friend in Germany is concerned about effectiveness of current vaccines against the new forms of the virus that are spreading, the mutations, some of which spread faster, with some more deadly. There is some early data on how that works out, in relation to the different vaccine forms in use, but it's too soon for those types of trends to be clearly identified. Some vaccines seem to be more effective against a broader range of variations of the virus, but it's not a subject that I'm following closely, and I'll skip adding another tangent here.
No comments:
Post a Comment