Ready or not (spoiler alert: not ready).
Gov. Greg Abbott could make an announcement as soon as Friday about reopening a wide range of Texas businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic, including restaurants, hair salons and retail outlets.
During a series of radio interviews Wednesday, Abbott gave the most details yet about the highly anticipated announcement, which he has been previewing since he announced preliminary steps to reopen the economy last week. He initially advertised the next wave of steps as scheduled for Monday but made clear in some of the interviews that they could now come sooner.
Abbott stressed in the interviews that he is seeking approval from medical advisers on the business reopenings and that they will reopen under new standards to slow the spread of the coronavirus. He also suggested his announcement’s implementation could vary by county, depending on how prevalent the virus is in each place.
“We’re gonna be making an announcement opening so many different types of businesses, where you’re gonna be able to go to a hair salon, you’re gonna be able to go to any type of retail establishment you want to go to, different things like that, with a structure in place that will ensure that we slow the spread of the coronavirus,” Abbott told Lubbock radio host Chad Hasty, adding that businesses won’t be “fully opened, but … will be opened in strategic ways, in ways that are approved by doctors to make sure we contain the coronavirus.”
[…]
Currently, Texans can patronize restaurants through takeout or delivery. Starting Friday, retailers will be able to deliver items to customers’ cars or homes under the “retail-to-go” model that Abbott recently announced. Abbott’s comments Wednesday seemed to suggest that Texans would soon be able to go inside those establishments, though they would still be required to follow unspecified standards to keep the virus at bay.
Abbott’s comments came five days after he announced his initial measures to restart the economy, naming a task force, reopening state parks, relaxing restrictions on medial surgeries and allowing “retail-to-go.”
See here for the background. Who knows what this means, and who knows what medical advisers he’s listening to. I mean, Lord knows I need a haircut, but last time I had one it was given by someone who was not six feet away from me. The word that first comes to mind in reading this is “half-baked”.
And let’s be honest about something here. Abbott could order all restrictions lifted tomorrow if he wanted, but the economy isn’t going to “reopen” until everyone feels comfortable going out in public and doing all the things we used to do before everything was shut down. And right now, all the evidence we have says most people are not going to do that. Would you go to a sit-down restaurant tomorrow? A movie theater? A gym? The Galleria? Is your office set to reopen? Mine isn’t, at least for the next week. Most of us have still done grocery shopping and things like that, but we have all greatly minimized our social interactions, to the extent that our jobs allow. What exactly do Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and all of the cheerleaders for reopening the economy think is going to happen? And what happens if the curve that everyone hopes is peaking starts to climb upwards again? The Chron has more.
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