Governor Greg Abbott says it’s now time to open Texas 100%, end the mask’s term across the state

This is a developing story and will be updated.

AUSTIN – Texans will no longer be required to wear a face mask in public and all companies can open at full capacity starting next week, Governor Greg Abbott announced on Tuesday.

“Many Texans have been excluded from employment opportunities. Many small business owners find it difficult to pay their bills. This should end, ”said Abbott during a press conference in Lubbock. “Now it’s time to open Texas 100%.”

“In addition, I am ending the mask’s mandate across the state,” he said.

“Texans have mastered habits to avoid COVID,” he said at a press conference at a Lubbock restaurant on Tuesday, in front of an almost unmasked crowd on Texas Independence Day.

Abbott also highlighted the fact that by next Wednesday, 7 million vaccines will have been administered to Texans.

Health officials advise against removing masks.

“We think it’s premature,” Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Phil Huang told Dallas County Commissioners hours before Abbott’s decision to close his July mask order. “It is still too early. We would all love to go back to normal. [But] it is not time to relax. “

Dallas County Commissioners believe that any reversal will produce mixed messages and send up COVID cases on the rise.

“If the governor suspends the restrictions,” said Commissioner Elba Garcia, a Democrat in western Dallas County, “it will be even more confusing.”

Companies can still limit capacity or implement additional security protocols at their own discretion, said Abbott.

And Abbott also said that if COVID-19 hospitalizations in any of the 22 hospital regions in Texas reach more than 15% of the hospital’s bed capacity in that region for seven consecutive days, the county judge can implement mitigation strategies . However, the governor said that judges cannot impose a prison sentence for failing to follow COVID-19’s orders, nor any penalties for not wearing a face mask. A county judge cannot limit occupation restrictions to less than 50%.

On Monday night, the governor tweeted in response to a post about his approval rating in a Morning Consult Poll, thanking the Texans for their support and adding, “I will have exciting news for you tomorrow.”

At a news conference in Corpus Christi last week to announce a program to vaccinate elderly people who stayed at home, he also suggested that Texas will soon move on to its third priority vaccination group in late March.

And with the growing number of people receiving the vaccine, he said the state could reverse the restrictions.

“We are now working to assess when we will be able to remove all orders across the state and will make announcements about it soon,” said Abbott last week.

He offered no further details. Since July, most Texans have been forced to wear a face mask in public. Restaurants and bars are limited in the number of customers that can receive indoors.

Congressman Richard Peña Raymond wrote to Abbott on Monday and urged the governor to maintain a mask term in place. Noting that only about 6% of Texans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, Raymond warned that repealing the mask requirement would result in more coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

“To be clear, your decisions have serious consequences,” wrote Raymond, D-Laredo. “I strongly recommend that you don’t give in or give up.”

Abbott, however, is facing pressure from some of his own party to lift restrictions that are said to infringe personal freedoms.

“We’re not going to rest or stop exposing you until EVERY term is suspended,” Shelley Luther, the Dallas salon owner who made national headlines for challenging state shutdown orders last spring, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

Although the COVID-19 vaccine is effective in preventing severe cases of the disease, scientists are still studying how it prevents transmission to others.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks, avoid crowds and distance themselves socially.

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently suggested in an interview on CNN that people may need to continue wearing masks until 2022.

After weeks of resisting a statewide mask order last year, Abbott imposed one before the July 4th holiday. It came when the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 – a metric that Abbott has consistently used to measure the pandemic – went up from 7,600.

He also closed bars around the same time and ordered restaurants to reduce their internal capacity.

In late July, new cases and hospitalizations began to fall. But they increased again in the fall and reached a new peak in mid-January. Experts attributed much of the increase to holiday meetings.

New daily case counts and hospitalizations started to drop again in late January, but are still high. This week, about 5,600 people across Texas were hospitalized with the virus. The state recorded an average of about 5,000 new cases per day in the past week.

Cases in northern Texas counties are declining, but the area is still registering a high number of deaths. On Monday, Dallas County reported 751 new cases of coronavirus and 42 more deaths; Tarrant County reported 395 cases of coronavirus and 10 deaths.