Government

TX Gov Throws Back To School Party For Covid, State Supreme Court Hocks Celebratory Spit Glob In Punch Bowl

Drink up, kids!

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The Delta variant is getting a warm welcome in Texas, where fewer than half of all residents are vaccinated against the coronavirus, ICU beds are full, the state is having to import health care workers, and children are being diagnosed with serious respiratory symptoms.

Naturally Governor Greg Abbott is doing all he can to protect kids too young to be vaccinated … by packing them into classrooms so they can breathe in each other’s faces for seven hours a day without so much as a piece of cloth over their mouths to protect them. And the state’s highest court is there to ensure it happens, staying lower court orders which would have allowed Dallas and Bexar County schools to require students to wear masks in class. For freedom!

On Friday, the state’s 4th Court of Appeals in San Antonio and the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas blocked Abbott from enforcing the provisions of a May 18 executive order which banned mask mandates at any public school, reasoning that “COVID-19 hospitalizations and the rate of new COVID-19 cases have continued their steady decline.” Which may have been true in May, but it’s certainly not the case now.

Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to revise its guidance to block schools from requiring masks, irrespective of public health recommendations or the possibility that the state might find itself in the midst of a coronavirus spike three months later when kids went back to class.

Nevertheless, the TEA dutifully coughed up the requested guidance back in June. And they’re still at it, even as the situation reaches a crisis.

If someone in your kid’s class has lice, Texas schools have to tell you about it. But if a child has COVID, the school doesn’t have to disclose it because, according to the TEA, “Given the data from 2020-21 showing very low COVID-19 transmission rates in a classroom setting and data demonstrating lower transmission rates among children than adults, school systems are not required to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing.”

The CDC says otherwise, noting that, while earlier data suggested that children couldn’t spread the disease, “Studies that have systematically tested children and adolescents, irrespective of symptoms, for acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (using antigen or RT-PCR assays) or prior infection (through antibody testing) have found their rates of infection can be comparable, and in some settings higher, than in adults.”

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But that’s just more Fauci fascism, right? So Abbott and the TEA will stand up for Texans’ God-given right to voluntarily quarantine their kids after exposure — or not, as the spirit moves ya! — before sending them back to spew droplets all over their unmasked peers.

Dallas ISD Superintendent Dr. Michael Hinojosa says he doesn’t believe the stay is binding on the district’s schools, and kids there still have to show up in masks. Similarly, Travis County, which was not a party to the suit, says the county will be continuing its own school mask mandate. But with the state’s highest court, made up entirely of elected Republicans, springing into action on a Sunday to knock down the lower courts’ orders, it seems pretty likely that Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are going to get their way.

And with 829 students and 872 school staff members testing positive in the first week, they’re off to a rip-roaring start.

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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