As virus cases drop, Texas Gov. Abbott may gamble on re-opening bars – again
DALLAS, Texas -- A guy walks into a bar, which still isn't allowed in Texas.
But Jeff Brightwell owns this bar. Two months into an indefinite shutdown, he's just checking on the place — the tables six feet apart, the “Covid 19 House Rules” sign instructing drinkers not to mingle. All the safeguards that didn't keep the doors open because Dot's Hop House & Cocktail Courtyard is a bar under Texas law. And bars, in a pandemic? “Really not good," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's infectious disease expert, told Congress in June.
Thousands of bars forced to close after massive virus outbreaks swept across the U.S. this summer could be starting to see an end in sight as cases drop off and the political will for continuing lockdowns fades.
“Our governor waved the magic wand, put us out of business and offered us nothing,” said Brightwell, whose Dallas bar typically employs around 50 people. He says his industry has been scapegoated.
Bars remain under full closure orders in more than a half-dozen states, including hard-hit ones like Texas. As a result, hundreds of bar owners in Texas have now ramped up kitchens in order to legally operate as restaurants.
In Texas, where three in four of the state’s 13,400 deaths blamed on Covid-19 have occurred since July, the infection rate has now dipped below the 10% positivity rate that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott had set as one criteria for letting bars back in business.
He has teased that an another announcement about next steps in re-opening could come as early as this week, which won't come soon enough for the right wing of his party, which for months has blasted him over the lockdowns and a statewide mask mandate.
The decision is dicey for the governor who, pressure from bar owners aside, has faced less blowback from keeping bars shut than other sectors. Polls show about half of Americans favored requiring bars and restaurants to close when cases surged, and experts say the high risks of bars are by now proven — the combination of cozy spaces, loud music forcing people to lean in close and rounds of drinks relaxing even the best intentions to social distance.
Videos of crowded clubs have made bars avatars of rowdy rule-breakers, the ones ruining a return to normal for the rest of us.
“It’s way too soon. And it’s going to be too soon until we have a vaccine,” said Esmeralda Guajardo, the public health administrator in Cameron County on the Texas border, where hard-partying booze cruises on South Padre Island this summer drew fury from local officials.
Mark McClellan, former head of the Food and Drug Administration who has been advising Abbott on Texas’ reopening, said the first reopening of bars in Texas was too soon but can see a case for waiting for a vaccine as too long.
“This is part of our economy and there are jobs at stake," he said. “It's hard to reopen dance clubs and night clubs for similar kinds of reasons. If we're going to try it, we need to learn what went wrong from the June reopening."
McClellan said more enforcement of rules at bars is one step. Last month, some Texas bars hired a lobbying group and pledged to screen the temperature of every patron at the door, a step that would go father than restaurants.
“I've been to restaurants and seen my customers," said Greg Barrineau, who runs two bars in San Antonio called Drink Texas. “They haven't stopped drinking."
