Yup, That Maskless Texan Apocalypse Still Hasn’t Arrived

Texas’s statewide mask mandate ended March 9. The day before, Texas had 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new cases was 3,971. On that day, the state had 126,404 active cases of COVID-19. As of March 9, the seven-day average for new deaths was 104.

Yesterday, the state had 3,859 new cases, and the seven-day average for daily new cases is 3,057. The state had 93,430 active cases. The seven-day average for new deaths was 54. As I noted in late March and early April, the end of the statewide mask mandate did not generate a surge in cases or deaths, and shouldn’t have been reflexively denounced as “Neanderthal thinking” by President Biden.

(The day-to-day ups and downs of cases and deaths, along with delays in transmitting and collating data, are why seven-day averages are probably a better measure of state trends. The AP wrote yesterday, “New Texas COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to register at an above-average pace. State health officials reported more than 4,500 new cases and 82 new deaths, compared to the rolling seven-day daily average of more than 3,200 new cases and 55 deaths as calculated by Johns Hopkins University researchers.” And then yesterday the state had 3,859 new cases and 54 deaths. One day of particularly bad (or particularly good!) numbers is more likely to reflect a delay in reporting data than a sudden change in the state of the pandemic.)

There are a couple of possible reasons for why cases and deaths in Texas did not rise after the statewide mask mandate ended:

• The absence of a state mandate doesn’t mean that Texans stopped wearing masks.
• Warmer weather means people spend more time outdoors, and less time in close quarters with other people.
• Day by day, week by week, more Texans are vaccinated – more than 17 million doses administered, as of this morning – so large swaths of the most vulnerable are now protected.

The news in Texas isn’t all terrific, though. The daily number of new cases has plateaued around 3,000 per day since the beginning of April. After a nice steady decline from early March to mid-April, the seven-day average of daily new deaths has been flat for the past week or so.

And there appears to be a new variant that emerged in the state, that combines “genetic markers separately associated with rapid spread, severe disease and high resistance to neutralizing antibodies.”

GHRC first detected BV-1 in a saliva sample taken from a Texas A&M student as part of the university’s ongoing COVID-19 testing program. The sample tested positive at GHRC on March 5. It was re-tested and confirmed at a federally regulated lab at CHI St. Joseph Regional Hospital. The student resides off-campus, but is active in on-campus organizations. The student was given Texas A&M’s general reporting guidelines.

The student later provided a second sample that tested positive on March 25, indicating the variant may cause a longer lasting infection than is typical of COVID-19 for adults ages 18-24. A third sample obtained on April 9 was negative and revealed no evidence of virus.

The student presented mild cold-like symptoms in early to mid-March that never progressed in severity and were fully resolved by April 2.

That sounds scary, but note the diagnosed case was a student at Texas A&M, and thus probably not vaccinated yet. If this variant never turns into anything more than “mild cold-like symptoms” in a young, presumably reasonably healthy and unvaccinated person, then vaccinated people probably shouldn’t feel too worried. Also, the fact that this variant was first detected March 5, and as of yesterday no other cases have been detected, raises the question of whether this variant is really as contagious as it initially seems.