The Canadian Press
While Texas gets rid of the handcuffs of COVID-19, the lessons of 2020 are still important to many
LLANO, Texas – In this Texas weather-beaten city, where worn tributes to Donald Trump are still prominent among cactus and yucca plants along the two-lane highway, there are two types of shopkeepers. One guy is visibly nervous when the conversation turns to how residents of this part of Texas Hill Country feel about the social benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic – rules that the state abandoned entirely on Wednesday. The other is Buddy Howell. “Wearing a mask is like trying to catch mosquitoes with a fishing net,” said Howell, owner of Eagle Outfitters, an eclectic sporting goods store filled with ammunition, hunting knives and tactical equipment. Almost a year later, since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, Governor Greg Abbott ended the mask’s mandate across the state and allowed companies to open at full capacity. In parts of the United States such as rural Texas, where personal freedoms are sacrosanct and regulation is a dirty word, the move promises to highlight the country’s cultural and political divide. “Governor Abbott is not saying, ‘Everyone takes off their mask’ – no, he is not saying that,” said Howell, whose store includes an entire section of shelves full of Trump merchandise. “He is leaving it to companies like mine whether or not we are going to have masks in our stores, restaurants, cinemas or anywhere we go. We are smart enough to choose for ourselves.” Like nervous bar owners in an old Sergio Leone western, several other Howell business owners nervously dismissed questions about masks and how their customers feel about them. “This is a small town in Texas,” said one, who declined to give her name. “Nobody around here likes to wear a mask. But it’s not a political issue, it’s a health issue.” They described having measured disputes in their establishments in the past few months between customers who refused to wear facial covers and others who demanded that they put on masks. “We had people who were very, very angry on both sides – ‘They’re not wearing a mask, but they need one’, ‘You can’t make me wear a mask, that’s my freedom’,” said a chain – store manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to his employer’s no comment policy. “We listened to both. So, as a company, we decided that we didn’t want to be the executor.” Now, without a state-imposed rule requiring a mask, these clashes will be even more difficult to deal with for companies that have no plans to end their own mask requirements. “It will only make things worse. We will just have to smile and put up with it.” More than half of the elderly in Texas received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, including more than 220,000 people on Wednesday alone, Abbott said in his Twitter feed. The percentage of people who test positive for the disease has declined for 15 consecutive days, he added. But as states continue to declare an end to their restrictions – Mississippi has already done so, while Maryland will close capacity limits for business on Friday – public health officials are nervous. In Austin, just 90 minutes southeast of Llano, a fight was already brewing between the state and the city, where Mayor Steve Adler promised to keep the mask requirement and Texas promised to fight it. “We are looking for all available ways to stop them,” tweeted Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat, compared Abbott’s order to a death sentence for her constituents in a speech Tuesday at the House of Representatives. The state has consistently lagged behind the rest of the country in protecting its citizens and is now home to all five of COVID-19’s most prominent non-contagious variants, she said. “They have ‘long-haulers’ in Texas – people who continued to have COVID-19,” said Jackson Lee. “Let’s ignore misguided advice and do what’s right to save lives.” Still, it’s hard to blame Americans for seeing the bright side after their year. The death toll at COVID-19 rose from 540,000 on Wednesday, with the total number of cases closing at 30 million, when Congress finally approved Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion aid package. Vaccinations are advancing at an accelerated pace, thanks to a partnership designed by the White House between rivals Johnson & Johnson and Merck – so much so that Biden is meditating aloud on what the US will do if it finds a surplus dose. “If we have a surplus, we will share it with the rest of the world,” he said on Wednesday, while giving a brief preview of Thursday’s prime-time speech to the country, the first as president. Your message to Americans, in a nutshell: let’s go down. “I am going to talk about what comes next. I am going to launch the next phase of the COVID response and explain what we will do as a government and what we will ask the American people,” said Biden. “There is light at the end of this dark tunnel last year. We cannot let our guard down now or assume that victory is inevitable.” This Canadian Press report was first published on March 10, 2021. James McCarten, The Canadian Press