Texas said on Tuesday that it was withdrawing its masking requirement and would allow the full reopening of companies, the most expansive step in any state to remove restrictions on coronavirus, as Americans across the country are eager to emerge after a year of isolation in the pandemic.
© Kim Raff for The New York Times
As workers return to offices, restaurants reopen and children return to school, Americans hope that the reopening will be a sign of better months.
The move to Texas, with its 29 million inhabitants, goes beyond similar actions in other states and cities that are rushing to reduce as many limits as possible.
“Now is the time to open Texas 100 percent,” said Governor Greg Abbott, adding that “Covid has not suddenly disappeared,” but state mandates are no longer needed.
Across the country, governors and mayors are calibrating what is feasible, what is safe and what is politically practical.
In Chicago, tens of thousands of children returned to public schools this week, while snow-covered parks and playgrounds around the city that have been closed since March last year were opened. Mississippi also ended its term with the mask. Massachusetts restaurants were allowed to operate without capacity limits, and South Carolina eliminated its limits for large gatherings. San Francisco announced that indoor restaurants, museums, cinemas and gyms could reopen on a limited basis.
© Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press
Tens of thousands of children returned to public school in Chicago this week.
But federal health officials fear that state and local leaders may be acting too quickly.
“I know that people are tired; they want to get back to life, back to normal, ”said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Monday. “But we are not there yet.”
The divergent orientation has left many Americans in a dilemma: wondering whether to take the bait of optimism, as some officials in California, Michigan and North Carolina have endorsed widespread reopenings of businesses and schools, or address their own persistent concerns about the viruses and warnings from federal health officials who said it is premature to lift too many limits.
When Kitty Sherry, 36, sent her son, Jude, to her elementary school in Chicago this week, for the first time in almost a year, she felt caught in a middle ground between euphoria and worry.
“There is a part of me that is really excited that he is back in school,” said Sherry. But she said she was concerned about teachers’ health risks, and said her family still shunned restaurants and other indoor spaces because of the pandemic. “It’s not over yet,” she said. “So, there is not much celebration.”
© Daniel Dreifuss for The New York Times
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor for Covid-19, said there was a low risk of meeting at home for small groups of people who had been fully vaccinated.
Government officials sent ambiguous and often cautious messages to the public. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor for Covid-19, said this week that for small groups of people who have been fully vaccinated, the risk of meeting at home is low. Activities furthermore, he said, would depend on data, modeling and “common clinical sense”, adding that the CDC would soon have guidance on what vaccinated people could safely do.
© Travis Dove for The New York Times
Customers waited outside a bar in Columbia, SC, on the first night of extended state hours.
The message that many Americans are hearing from their elected officials, including leaders of both parties, is optimistic.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said on Tuesday that she was easing business restrictions and allowing family members who tested negative for coronavirus to visit nursing home residents. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker said that while residents should continue to wear masks in public, it is time for more limits on business to be eased.
In Kentucky, almost all school districts are offering face-to-face classes, while the state runs to vaccinate teachers as soon as possible. Governor Andy Beshear told reporters last week that the state’s declining infection statistics showed that immunizations were starting to have an impact.
“It means that vaccination works,” he said. “We are already seeing. We are seeing this in these numbers. It is a very positive sign. “
In Texas, Governor Abbott’s suspension of limits will take effect on March 10. Some Democrats have sharply criticized the idea, saying it suggests a more optimistic picture of the state’s progress with the coronavirus than the reality.
There are reasons for optimism: vaccinations have increased significantly in the past few weeks, and daily reports of new cases of coronavirus have dropped across the country from January’s peaks.
The positive signs come with warnings. Although national statistics have improved dramatically since January, they have stabilized in the past week or so, and the United States is still reporting more than 65,000 new cases per day on average – comparable to last summer’s peak, according to a report New York Times database. The country averages more than 2,000 deaths per day, although deaths are a lagging indicator because it can take weeks after coronavirus infection to die.
New and more contagious variants of the virus are circulating in the country, with the potential to increase the case count again. The tests have dropped by 30% in recent weeks, leaving experts concerned about how quickly new outbreaks will be known. And millions of Americans are still waiting to be vaccinated – including restaurant workers, who are now open in large numbers across the country.
In states like Florida and South Dakota, schools and businesses have been widely open for months, and many state and local authorities across the country have been easing limitations since last summer. Even so, the pace of reopening has accelerated considerably in recent days.
“We hope to be between what I hope will be the last big wave and the beginning of the period when I expect Covid to become very unusual,” said Robert Horsburgh, an epidemiologist at the School of Public Health at Boston University. “But we don’t know that. I have been arguing that we should stand for another four to six weeks. “
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said there were signs that the country could endure the worst of the pandemic. But she is still concerned that states are reopening too quickly, repeating the same mistakes made in earlier periods of the pandemic, when flexible rules were followed by new peaks of cases.
“Instead of opening some less risky things and seeing just to make sure the numbers don’t change, it looks like they’re just opening the floodgates,” said Nuzzo.
Most schools across the country are open to students, at least partially in person, and the evidence suggests that they did so with relative security. But the reopening of schools in some districts has been repeatedly delayed by outbreaks in communities where other types of restrictions remain lifted.
“My son is due to arrive at the end of the week to attend hybrid learning for the first time,” said Dr. Nuzzo, who lives in Maryland. “In the meantime, restaurant restrictions have been lifted, cinemas are coming back and it looks like we’re going to at least let him into the classroom first.”
In South Carolina, authorities this week lifted a rule requiring restaurants to close until 11 pm, and in North Carolina, bars were allowed to open indoors with limited capacity last weekend for the first time since March. past.
Last year’s stoppage forced Zack Medford, 38, to abruptly close the five bars he owned in North Carolina, lay off 80 employees and apply for unemployment insurance. He had to give up two of his bars after delaying rent payments while they were empty.
But on Wednesday, the state announced that the bars could open on Friday at 30% of their internal capacity. With a two-day notice for the reopening, he called the former employees, who were eager to get back to work, and replenished the stock. Then, on Friday, he opened his doors and welcomed regular customers he hadn’t seen in a year to have a drink at the bar.
“It was an exhilarating feeling to see this happen,” said Medford, who is also the president of the state’s association of bars and taverns. “It was really the first time in a year that I got out of bed and I was excited, I had something to look forward to.”
After some counties in Washington state allowed movie theaters to reopen, Nick Butcher, 36, made up for lost time by watching the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for three nights in a row. He bought M&M at the concession stand, sat away from the others in the audience and said he felt like things were almost back to normal.
“In fact, I’m generally optimistic,” said Butcher, a Microsoft software engineer who recently recovered from a Covid-19 case, as well as several relatives. “This week is one of the first times that I went to my office almost since the pandemic began.”
A return to crowded office spaces and schools left other Americans excited and uneasy.
Amanda Sewell, a teacher at Tates Creek High School in Lexington, Ky., Will welcome students to her classroom next Monday for the first time in a year. Decorations for last year’s Mardi Gras celebration are still hanging in the class. The date on her whiteboard still shows March 13, 2020 – the day school closed and she went home, confident that it would be only a few weeks before she and her students returned to the classroom.
Ms. Sewell is fully vaccinated against the virus now and said she is thrilled to see her students in person after teaching squares that have not responded on Zoom for months. But she knows that things will not be the same as before.
“I’m still a little suspicious because I feel that some people feel that because we have a vaccine, the pandemic is over, and it definitely isn’t,” Sewell said. “I feel like we’re still several months away from being anywhere near where it was normal.”
Dave Montgomery contributed reporting.
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