Editorial Roundup: Safety shouldn’t be optional as Texas reopens
Austin American-Statesman. May 10, 2020.
Safety shouldn’t be optional as Texas reopens
Let’s drop the pretense that “data and doctors” are driving the plan to reopen the Texas economy. We can see Texans’ health is becoming an afterthought in the rush to get cash registers ringing again.
How else to explain Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to reopen even more businesses — barbershops and hair salons this past Friday, gyms on May 18 — while the state’s new coronavirus cases continue to rise? Yes, Texas has ample hospital capacity. But that doesn’t mean we should be cavalier about policies that could put more people into those beds.
The governor is allowing more businesses to reopen before we can see how the first phase of reopenings went. It can take up to two weeks for people to show symptoms and get tested for the coronavirus — meaning we won’t see the public health impact of the May 1 reopenings of restaurants and shops until at least mid-May.
Worse, Abbott has refused to require businesses and customers to take common-sense safety precautions to help prevent the spread of the virus. He has offered masks, sanitation guidelines and social distancing strategies as recommended protocols — good ideas for people to follow, but no penalties if they don’t.
Abbott noted this week that reopening hair and nail salons posed unique challenges because those services are delivered through close personal contact. “The only safe way that you can go about providing that service, while ensuring that we’re doing everything possible to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, would be for both the person providing the service and the customer (to be) wearing a face mask,” he said. And still: Face masks are only recommended, not required.
As if to drive home the point that business owners are really free to do as they please, Abbott last week dialed back his earlier stay-at-home order to ensure defiant Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther wouldn’t stay in jail for violating it. Why should any business owner take any of Abbott’s advisories seriously?
We recognize the local and state stay-at-home orders dramatically slowed the spread of the coronavirus at a tremendous cost. Many business owners can’t cover their bills. A staggering 1.8 million Texans have filed for unemployment benefits in the seven weeks since Abbott declared a statewide emergency. But the economy won’t turn around until workers and customers feel safe going back to businesses. We need real leadership, real standards to make that happen.
Unfortunately, instead of leadership, we get a systematic outsourcing of risk. The Trump administration has pointedly made coronavirus response a matter for the states. The Abbott administration has passed the buck to businesses, workers and customers: It’s up to them to decide how and when they feel comfortable engaging in commerce. Some will return to work even if they don’t feel safe because they can’t afford to go any longer without pay.
Remarkably, the governor suggested this week that Texans have sole control over whether they get this highly contagious respiratory disease. Praising residents for their hand-washing, mask-wearing, social-distancing habits, Abbott said, “every single Texan has the full capability themselves to make sure they do not contract COVID-19 by practicing these very simple strategies.”
Those are best practices, but they are not foolproof. And they are no substitute for a science-based, government-led effort to minimize the risks of exposure while allowing business to resume as safely as possible.
Making safety measures voluntary, and telling residents they have total control over whether they catch the virus, ignores a crucial truth about highly infectious diseases: We all need to take steps to protect each other. Our actions affect not only ourselves, but those with weakened immune systems, those working essential jobs, and legions of healthcare workers who are at risk for exposure if hospital beds fill up with COVID-19 patients.
We see many signs of people trying to do the right thing. Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt calling on everyone to wear masks. Restaurants sticking with safer to-go service instead of opening up their dining rooms. Movie theaters holding off on reopening altogether. Local business leaders working on safe operating guidelines.
Their efforts may be enough to stave off a spike in coronavirus cases. We hope so. But we’d stand a better chance if Abbott led the way with data-driven decisions and safety standards backed up by the true force of law, not optional advisories and mandates that are flexible when it’s convenient.
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The Dallas Morning News. May 8, 2020.
Stimulus checks shouldn’t penalize citizens for their spouses
Of the many shortfalls of Congress’s pushed-through-too-fast CARES Act, one has seemed particularly misguided: Denying economic assistance to people who are U.S. citizens because they’re married to someone who isn’t.
Under the original $2 trillion stimulus package passed March 27, citizens are excluded from receiving aid if they file taxes jointly with someone who lacks a Social Security number. This includes 4.3 million immigrants who pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).
Hurry and worry make for bad policy, and in this case, lawmakers looked for broad strokes and sweeping categories to allow them to fast-track aid without worry that it might benefit illegal immigrants. That produced a stimulus package that left out an estimated 2 million citizens such as Christina Segundo of Fort Worth and her four children, who are also U.S. citizens. Had Segundo not filed her taxes jointly (and early) with her husband, who isn’t a citizen but who pays taxes using an ITIN, her family would have received $3,200. Now, they’ll get nothing.
But if the CARES criteria was misguided, so has been the response from opponents.
Segundo has joined a class-action lawsuit filed last week by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund against Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the IRS and others. The suit claims that CARES is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment’s freedom of expression clause and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. Neither seems a particularly strong argument to us, though we can see that there might be a case on the grounds of equal protection.
At the same time, California lawmakers have introduced a bill called the Leave No Taxpayer Behind Act, which would not only ensure stimulus payments to citizens in these situations but also to the noncitizens they married.
Let’s be clear: CARES was wrong to exclude U.S. citizens from its stimulus package because of their marital status. It’s a bad policy that needs to be fixed. The government does have a right (and obligation) to be prudent with our tax dollars — after all, even public debt has to be repaid — but it also has an obligation to be fair.
We recommend a middle path: The courts should reject the class-action lawsuit and Congress should not take up the No Taxpayer Behind Act, but it should fix its sloppy work on a CARES Act that excludes American citizens from help.
Four days before the CARES Act became law, we worried that Congress was choosing speed over effectiveness. We recommended breaking up the stimulus package into smaller, more finely-tuned segments to roll out over time because, it turns out, it’s hard to spend $2 trillion well. Now, there is follow-in legislation and a lawsuit that prove the point.
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Houston Chronicle. May 6, 2020.
Parents’ fear is understandable. Skipping vaccinations isn’t.
Imagine if Dr. Anthony Fauci could snap his fingers right now and — poof! — a life-saving vaccine would magically appear in a handy nose spray or sterile vile at a doctor’s office near you.
Just like that, a deadly viral foe would be thwarted, untold deaths and illnesses prevented. We’d all be back to work, back to school, and the economy would be freed from perpetual life support.
Ridiculous fantasy? You bet. But only for the novel coronavirus.
Right now, at your nearest pediatrician’s office, there are arsenals of life-saving vaccines that do the work every day of thwarting viral and bacterial foes — or at least keeping them in exile — and preventing illness, death and the social and economic paralysis many Americans are experiencing for the first time thanks to this pandemic.
For the first time, Americans who did not live through measles or polio or maybe never even had chicken pox — people completely unfamiliar with the terms “iron lung” or “Calamine bath” — are finally grasping the power, the necessity, the luxury of vaccines.
And yet, as we wait with bated breath for scientists to develop a vaccine that can sometimes seem far out of reach, parents shouldn’t forget the vaccines readily at their fingertips.
Vaccination rates appear to be dropping nationwide amid the novel coronavirus outbreak because parents are wary of taking their children to the doctor.
Data from 1,000 pediatricians across the country show that during the week of April 5, administration of measles, mumps and rubella shots fell by 50 percent when compared to a pre-COVID week in February. Diphtheria and whooping cough shots dropped by 42 percent and HPV shots by 73 percent, The New York Times reported, citing findings by PCC, a pediatric electronic health records company.
Others have reported less drastic declines, but American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Sara “Sally” Goza has been sounding the alarm on missed vaccines.
“Disrupting immunization schedules, even for brief periods, can lead to outbreaks of infections like measles or whooping cough that can be even more threatening to a child’s health,” she and American Medical Association President Dr. Patrice Harris wrote last week in an op-ed in USA Today.
This is an especially dangerous trend in Texas, where we’ve seen a 2,000 percent increase in vaccine exemptions since 2003. That’s the year Texas began allowing parents to decline required immunizations for non-medical reasons — which turned out to mean any reason at all.
Only a year ago, the Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman reported on a study showing Harris County — due to international travel and vaccine opt-out rates — is one of the nation’s most vulnerable counties to an outbreak of measles, the highly contagious, potentially fatal virus that was largely eradicated two decades ago.
Even without a pandemic, doctors must battle misinformation campaigns of the anti-vaccine movement, which according to a recent Texas Monthly report is already gearing up to spread fear and conspiracy theories about a novel coronavirus vaccine before it even exists.
The last thing we need is responsible parents who understand and support the vital role of vaccines to unwittingly set off another outbreak of an easily preventable disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that childhood immunizations among children born just since 1994 will prevent more than 419 million illnesses, 8 million hospitalizations and 936,000 early deaths.
Parents’ concerns about taking their kids to the doctor during a pandemic are understandable. But they may be unfounded. For one thing, evidence suggests COVID-19 symptoms have been relatively minor in children.
For another thing, many pediatricians have rushed to respond with staggered hours for sick and for well kids, and policies that allow families to wait in their cars until the patient’s name is called.
Dr. William Hogan, with Texas Children’s Pediatric Medical Group, said his practice on Kirby Drive sees healthy kids in the morning, taking temperatures of all who enter and barring entry to those with fever.
“I think we and other pediatricians’ offices are doing it in a way that parents should feel safe enough to come in and do it,” Hogan said.
Children suspected of COVID-19 are carefully screened by phone and, if testing is recommended, they are referred to an off-site parking garage for drive-through testing.
“The kid never gets out of the car seat,” Hogan said.
He said parents should talk to health providers about concerns.
In some cases, providers may permit brief delays and alternative vaccine schedules. Parents can consult the CDC’s catch-up vaccination schedule for guidance on minimum intervals between shots.
But delaying first-year vaccinations is another matter: “Babies’ immune systems are kind of dumb. They need to be repeatedly prodded at two, four and six months,” he said. “It’s a process of priming the immune system to recognize the viruses and bacteria.”
Interrupting that process puts the child at risk of infection — and others as well.
Parents, please don’t skip vaccinations for your children. We’ve got all we can handle with this pandemic. We don’t need outbreaks we can prevent.
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