Anwar Alsaeedi sits with his children at their home in Sanaa, Yemen, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021. Alsaeedi, who had hoped to provide his two children with a better future, said he rejoiced in 2017 when he was picked for the lottery’s “diversity visa” interview. Then he was ineligible due to the Trump administration’s travel ban that affected several Muslim-majority nations. “Our country is embroiled in wars and crises and we’ve lost everything,” he said. “Making it to America is a big dream.”
AP Photo/Hani Mohammed
The Biden administration said it would offer visas to people denied entry due to Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”
But the administration is not granting entry to those who had obtained “diversity visas.”
Thousands of such visas are issued each year to members of underrepresented groups.
The last administration’s ban on travel from several majority-Muslim nations was “morally wrong,” in the words of President Joe Biden. But the new administration is denying entry to thousands of people who were affected by it.
Biden, soon after taking office, rescinded the so-called “Muslim ban.” And, this week, his administration announced that a majority of those who were denied entry to the US because of it could apply again for a visa.
But the White House left out one significant group: thousands of people who were selected to receive “diversity visas” – intended, as the name suggests, to encourage migration from underrepresented people – only to have them taken away by an executive order by Donald Trump, who then tried to eliminate the diversity program altogether.
People like Anwar al Saeedi, a Yemeni man who in 2017 expected to be moving to the US with his wife and two young children.
“It was a big dream for me to be able to move my children to America to live in a respectable country, which respects human rights and where it’s possible to live in safety,” he told NPR earlier this year. He is, instead, living in the African nation of Djibouti, where he traveled with his family, spending thousands of dollars to attend interviews for his visa (the US embassy in Yemen has been shuttered amid years of war).
“It’s disheartening and disappointing,” Abed Ayoub, legal and policy director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told Insider. The committee represents people like Anwar who made plans for a new life, only for it to be denied.
“These individuals are in a worse off position now,” Ayoub said, “because this government, regardless of whether it’s Biden or Trump, made a promise to them and they acted on that.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups to challenge Trump’s travel ban, called the new administration’s decision a disgrace.
“President Biden just dusted off Trump’s ‘CLOSED’ sign and locked the door behind him,” the ACLU attorney Manar Waheed said in a statement. “This decision threatens to forever prevent thousands of Black and Brown immigrants who meet all of the legal requirements to immigrate to the United States from doing so, perpetuating the effects of the discriminatory ban.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it excluded diversity visa recipients from its reversal of the Muslim ban.
But one reason could be the law: The US State Department is limited to issuing 55,000 diversity visas a year, with a specific number set aside for various parts of the world. According to Reuters, Ned Price, a State Department spokesperson, on Monday said that the statute authorizing the program also requires applicants to demonstrate their qualifications within the same fiscal year they were chosen.
Ayoub thinks that’s something of a cop-out. His group had lobbied the administration to bypass any legal issue by granting “humanitarian parole” to those still hurt by the travel ban. Said parole can be issued, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, to someone “who is otherwise inadmissible into the United States for a temporary period of time due to an emergency.”
From there, a more permanent solution could be worked on. Ayoub said the goal now is legislation that would allow those on humanitarian parole to apply for asylum or some other residency-granting legal status once they are here.
“But we need the administration and Congress to be on the same page,” he said. “If you call the Muslim ban discriminatory, and you call it a stain, then you should the full extent to rectify what was done.”
A man from Venezuela seeking asylum in the United States holds his daughter at the entrance to the Paso del Norte International Bridge after the news that the Migrant Protection Protocols program was halted on February 28, 2020, in Ciudad Juárez.
PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden administration is granting Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans.
Venezuelans are the leading group of asylum-seekers. About 320,000 are eligible for TPS.
TPS protects recipients from the threat of deportation.
Venezuelans who have fled economic devastation and political repression will no longer have to fear deportation from the United States, the Biden administration announced Monday, fulfilling one of the president’s campaign promises.
An estimated 320,000 Venezuelans in the US are now eligible for Temporary Protected Status, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times. TPS is granted to nationals from countries where it would be unsafe to return.
Venezuela has been in an economic and political freefall since the collapse of oil prices in 2014, exacerbated by rank corruption and, since 2019, US sanctions on the country’s all-important petroleum sector. That has led to an exodus from the country – 5.4 million people, according to the United Nations, or nearly 20% of its population – with the vast majority settling elsewhere in South America, namely Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
But tens of thousands have also made it to the US. Fom fiscal years 2017 to 2019, the Department of Homeland Security reported that Venezuelans were by far the largest group of asylum-seekers, averaging more than 25,000 per year and exceeding the number from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, combined.
-Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 8, 2021
In its formal designation, DHS says Venezuelans are receiving protected status due to the “severe economic crisis” back home, as well as “a prolonged political crisis” sparked by President Nicolas Maduro’s disputed victory in the country’s 2018 election and effective dissolution of its democratically elected legislature.
To apply for TPS, Venezuelans will need to pay $135 in fees and another $410 for a work permit, The Miami Herald reported. Those who enter the US on or after March 8 are ineligible.
The announcement comes days after Colombia, home to nearly 2 million Venezuelan migrants, granted those refugees legal status for the next decade.
Juan Escalante, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela and digital campaigns manager at FWD.us, which advocates for criminal justice and immigration reform, said he was relieved by the news.
“The chaos, turmoil, and political unrest that has consumed my native homeland of Venezuela is heartbreaking,” he said in a statement, “and the idea that more than 300,000 Venezuelans who have been living in and contributing to the US could be deported to a country where their lives and freedoms would be threatened is terrifying.”
While the last administration claimed to support Venezuelans, it continued to deport them back to a country that it publicly condemned as violent and authoritarian. It was only on January 19, a day before leaving office, that the former president offered legal protections to some 94,000 Venezuelans.
“This shows solidarity with the over 5 million Venezuelans that have fled the country,” Geoff Ramsey, director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America, a DC think tank, told Insider. He urged the administration to “go even further,” however, and pressure its allies in South America to increase social services for the Venezuelan diaspora elsewhere.
“Far too many other countries have backtracked on their commitments to fleeing Venezuelans,” he said.
Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at a press conference in Trump Tower as Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of The Trump Organization, looks on January 11, 2017.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
Allen Weisselberg has been the Trump Organization’s longtime loyal CFO and family bookkeeper.
The Manhattan DA is reportedly trying to “flip” him for its investigation into Trump’s finances.
Weisselberg and his family’s close ties to the Trumps go into legal gray areas.
The mustachioed, press-shy Allen Weisselberg has served as the Trump Organization’s Chief Financial Officer for decades, as well as Trump’s personal bookkeeper. Now, he’s reportedly the subject of a wide-ranging inquiry from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Prosecutors are looking into “flipping” Weisselberg into cooperating with an investigation into Trump’s finances, according to the Washington Post. Weisselberg, 73, has loyally served the Trump family since the 1970s and is the only person not a member of Trump’s family to oversee his trust while he was president. Prosecutors are reportedly zeroing in on Weisselberg’s two sons, both of whom also have close ties to the company.
Given his vast familiarity with the Trump family’s finances and their network of companies, Weisselberg could be the most important source for any investigation into Trump’s finances.
He’s also worked with prosecutors before.
Weisselberg knows more about the Trump Organization’s finances than anyone else
Weisselberg got his start with the Trump family in the 1970s as a bookkeeper for Fred Trump.
Over the years, he ascended the ranks of the Trump Organization to become its chief financial officer, and has held the keys to the family’s financial life, as well. (While other reports refer to him as an accountant, Weisselberg does not hold a CPA license, according to New York state records.)
“There’s a misconception about The Trump Organization that it’s this big, massive company with 10,000 employees,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a vice president for the Trump Organization, said in Congressional testimony. “It’s not. I mean, the entire company was really run by 12 of us.”
Weisselberg’s name made headlines in 2018 and 2019 as federal prosecutors investigated Cohen’s hush-money payments ahead of the 2016 election to women who accused Trump of having affairs with them.
Michael Cohen.
Craig Ruttle/AP Images
Cohen released a tape purporting to show Weisselberg discussing how to facilitate the payments and what they might mean for the Trump Organization. And while Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to federal crimes in connection with the scheme, The Wall Street Journal reported Weisselberg himself received immunity for cooperating with the investigators in the Southern District of New York who prosecuted Cohen, avoiding charges.
While the Manhattan District Attorney’s office likely has all the documents they need for their investigation, Jeff Robbins, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw money-laundering investigations, said that having someone like Weisselberg guide them through all the evidence could be enormously helpful.
“I’m sure the records have been turned over by the hundreds and thousands,” Robbins told Insider. “However, it sure makes it a lot easier if you have somebody who can walk the prosecutors through the documents and explain the sequence, and who would have had direct conversations with Trump.”
Unlike Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, two of Trump’s eldest children who play leading roles in his company, Weisselberg has made few forays into politics. New York state voter registration records reviewed by Insider show that he’s a registered Republican living in Manhattan’s Upper West Side (the building previously carried Trump branding that has since been removed), but he didn’t donate to any of his boss’ presidential campaigns.
In this Aug. 21, 2018, file photo, Michael Cohen leaves federal court, in New York.
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
But he did donate to two of Trump’s political rivals. FEC records published by the Center for Responsive Politics show that Weisselberg donated to Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York’s 2010 campaign and to former Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona’s presidential campaign in 2008. Both donations predated Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Trump himself donated to Schumer’s campaigns in the 1990s.
Weisselberg also donated to former Illinois Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a Democrat who led the House’s powerful Ways and Means Committee, in 1994. The donation came a month before Rostenkowski was criminally indicted for his role in a corruption scandal that ultimately led to his resignation and a guilty plea on mail fraud charges.
Weisselberg and his wife have a home, a short drive away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, in Boynton Beach, Florida. They’re currently involved in a lawsuit with their homeowner insurance company over damage following 2017’s Hurricane Irma.
Mary Mulligan, an attorney representing Weisselberg at Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman LLP, declined to comment for this story.
His family’s financial ties with the Trump Organization go into legal gray areas
The Trumps have always seemed to have a porous wall between their personal finances and their businesses and foundations. In 2019, Trump paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit the New York Attorney General’s office brought, alleging he used resources from The Trump Foundation to boost his political fortunes.
These gray areas reportedly extend to Weisselberg and his family. And they also run into possible legal conundrums.
In this file photo taken on January 11, 2017, US President-elect Donald Trump along with his children Eric (L) Ivanka and Donald Jr.(R) arrive for a press conference at Trump Tower in New York, accompanied by Allen Weisselberg (2nd R), chief financial officer of The Trump Organization.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
In November 2000, according to Bloomberg News, Trump gave a unit at Trump Parc East, a condominium building at 100 Central Park South, to Weisselberg and his wife, Hilary. Records reviewed by Insider show it had a sale price of $152,500, an eye-poppingly low price for prime Manhattan real estate.
The couple sold it to their son Jack Weisselberg in 2003 for $148,000, who sold it for $570,000 in 2006, Bloomberg News reported.
Jack Weisselberg works as a finance director at Ladder Capital, his LinkedIn page says. The firm is one of Trump’s primary real estate lenders, loaning him $280 million to finance four of his Manhattan properties, according to records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
Barry Weisselberg, another one of Allen Weisselberg’s sons, has even closer and more complicated financial ties with the Trumps. He’s an employee at the Trump Organization, having managed the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park, which until recently was run by the company through a contract with New York City.
Workers clear the ice at Wollman Rink in Central Park, after the city severed several contracts with the Trump Organization, in New York City, U.S., January 14, 2021.
REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
He, too, received an apartment at the Trump Parc East building. According to Bloomberg News, Barry and his now-ex-wife Jennifer Weisselberg received it as a wedding gift in the mid-2000s from Trump and paid for only utilities, at around $400 per month. When the couple moved out, it was rented out for nearly $5,000 per month, and a Trump-owned entity sold it for $2.8 million in 2014, according to Bloomberg.
But while Barry and Jennifer Weisselberg both lived there, Barry listed it as a corporate apartment in his divorce proceedings, Bloomberg News reported. Their tax returns, though, according to Bloomberg News, didn’t always list the apartment as a corporate perk. The designation may mean that Barry Weisselberg and the Trump Organization itself may have not paid the correct amount of taxes on the apartment, Bloomberg’s Caleb Melby reported.
That apartment – and its tax ramifications – are a subject of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s investigation, according to the Washington Post.
“On the question of where Allen Weisselberg stands in the evidence pyramid, he stands right below Donald Trump himself,” Robbins, now an attorney at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr, told Insider. “So it does appear to be an exploration on the part of the DA’s office as to whether or not they can flip Allen Weisselberg by leveraging one of his two sons.”
Pedestrians pass the Trump Parc East building Tuesday, May 31, 2016, in New York.
AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
The investigation into the Weisselbergs grew out of Vance’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s business dealings with other companies, including Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital. Jack Weisselberg is also a subject of the probe, though it’s unclear if he had any role in loans Ladder Capitol gave to the Trump organization, according to Bloomberg News.
The Trump Organization also gave Barry Weisselberg an Upper East Side townhouse while he was in the divorce process in 2018, according to Bloomberg News. It isn’t clear how Weisselberg and the Trump Organization treated it in tax filings.
While Allen Weisselberg seems to have been loyal to the Trump family for years, Robbin said the pressure on his family could flip him.
“The likelihood of him cooperating goes up significantly if, in fact, the prosecutors have criminal charges that can reasonably be brought against his sons,” Robbins said. “For the simple human reason that what father would not do something unpleasant in order to help his sons out of a legal jam?”
Apartments seem to be a common perk for Trump employees. Cohen also had an apartment in one of Trump’s buildings while working for the mogul, and former communications director Hope Hicks stayed in one “rent-free” during Trump’s 2016 campaign. Matthew Calamari, Trump’s loyal longtime head of security, also has a home in the Trump Parc East building, according to records reviewed by Insider.
Jake Weisselberg and representatives for Ladder Capital didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. Barry Weisselberg couldn’t be reached for comment. Jennifer Weisselberg didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The CFO testified for federal prosecutors in Manhattan who secured Cohen’s guilty plea. Weisselberg helped the Trump Organization reimburse Cohen the $130,000 hush-money payment he made to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who said she had sex with Donald Trump during Melania Trump’s pregnancy.
Weisselberg’s name didn’t appear in the charging documents against Cohen, and he was never charged for his participation in the scheme.
Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former attorney, arrives for his sentencing at United States Court house in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., December 12, 2018.
REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Cohen hasn’t forgiven Weisselberg. When the news broke that prosecutors were looking into Weisselberg’s family, he took to Twitter.
“Remember that Allen Weisselberg received (federal) immunity from the SDNY to provide information and testify against me for the @StormyDaniels payment. #KarmaBoomerang,” Cohen wrote.
Weisselberg told prosecutors he had little knowledge of the Trump Foundation’s operations and testified he had no knowledge that he was on the Trump Foundation’s board of directors in a deposition transcript reviewed by Insider.
He did, however, testify that the foundation was used to boost Trump’s campaign in 2016. James’ office used the testimony in its lawsuit against the Trump Foundation where a judge forced Trump to pay a $2 million fine.
Weisselberg’s vast knowledge of Trump’s finances has made him a target in civil lawsuits, as well.
He was a defendant in a 2017 lawsuit from William Weinstein, a New York resident who sought to create a mechanism to ensure that Trump wouldn’t take foreign profits as president through the Trump Organization. It was dismissed in short order, with the judge ruling that Weinstein didn’t have the standing to sue. Trump has steadfastly refused to release financial records, and The New York Times reported that Trump has paid far more in foreign taxes over the past two decades than in US taxes.
He’s been less helpful in an ongoing investigation from the New York AG
Weisselberg also testified in a different, ongoing investigation into Trump’s finances from James’ office, sitting for a deposition under subpoena in July and August 2020.
“When examined by [the office of the attorney general], however, Mr. Weisselberg testified that he had no first-hand knowledge of this fact, had not reviewed the relevant documents to confirm that any such understanding was true, could not identify any return on which the forgiveness was treated as income, and instead was relying solely upon his recollection of conversations he had years earlier with the Trump Organization’s accountants concerning the tax treatment of the amount of the debt that was forgiven,” the filing says.
Former President Donald Trump and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The lack of information Weisselberg gave them in his testimony led the attorney general’s office to subpoena the Trump Organization for its tax documents, prosecutors wrote.
In March 2017, WikiLeaks published a trove of leaked CIA hacking tools. The agency’s internal report, obtained last year by The Washington Post, eventually blamed the CIA’s hackers for spending too much effort “building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems.”
A month after the CIA tools leaked, a group called the Shadow Brokers dumped its fifth batch of hacking tools that it had stolen from the NSA’s elite “Tailored Access Operations” group. Those tools were then used by foreign actors to carry out extensive cyberattacks, including the infamous WannaCry attacks, whose targets included American companies and government agencies.
For decades, the US has had the most sophisticated arsenal of cyberweapons in the world. But America’s focus on building up its cyber offenses – and lack of focus on defensive measures – has increasingly become one of its biggest weaknesses, The New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth argues in a new book.
In “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Perlroth, who has covered cybersecurity for more than a decade, says other countries’ cyber capabilities have caught up to the US in recent years. At the same time, she argues, America’s critical infrastructure – because so much of it is owned by private companies and connected to the internet – has become a huge target for its adversaries.
“More nation-states and cybercriminals target the United States with cyberattacks than almost any other nation, and we’re the most vulnerable because we’re the most wired,” Perlroth said in an interview with Insider.
That wasn’t always the case, Perlroth said, adding that the US is largely to blame for the flood of attacks.
In 2010, the US and Israel used a computer worm known as Stuxnet to sabotage a substantial portion of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, in what is widely considered the first cyber “use of force” that dealt damage in the physical world. Eventually, the code that powered the attack leaked online and hackers around the world – including in Iran – were able to reverse engineer it and re-deploy it for their own purposes.
According to Perlroth, that ignited a cyber arms race that hasn’t stopped.
“Since then, almost every government on earth with maybe the exception of Antarctica has pursued these programs,” Perlroth said. “And any government official will readily admit that the target of that attack – that Iran – caught up in terms of its capabilities for cyberattacks in a much shorter timeframe than we gave it credit for.”
Countries like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea have poured massive amounts of resources into their cyber capabilities and have successfully hit American targets using tools originally built by the US and its allies as well as tools developed in-house. And because it’s so difficult to definitively attribute a cyberattack to a specific country, Perlroth said, the threat of the US retaliating with a strong offensive attack isn’t as strong of a deterrent as it is with conventional weapons.
“We don’t need to back off on offense,” she said. “But the thing is, if we’re going to pursue an offensive strategy, if we’re going to just keep hacking into our adversaries…then we need to make sure that our own grid and our own critical infrastructure isn’t vulnerable. And right now we’re incredibly vulnerable.”
“These are all things that could happen simultaneously and would be in many ways more deadly than a bomb going off somewhere,” Perlroth said, adding that these threats are amplified by the fact that private companies like Solarwinds, which own and operate the vast majority of US infrastructure, are first and foremost concerned with making money.
“The incentive has been get your product first to market, make your products easily accessible, not just to customers, but employees and contractors and vendors,” she said. Perlroth also said that, following the Solarwinds hack, the US government should “pause here and take inventory” of its own IT systems, including which software touches various networks, who makes it and where, and what security practices those companies have in place.
Ultimately, Perlroth said the US needs to better incentivize companies to prioritize security, both by requiring and rewarding good security practices through stricter legal requirements and tax credits, but also by slapping fines on “companies whose passwords are ‘Solarwinds123.’“
On Tuesday, Texas became the largest US state to lift its COVID-19 mask mandate, as a number of states have begun loosening restrictions.
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Michigan also announced easing some restrictions this week, while Iowa, Montana, and North Dakota ditched state-wide mask mandates earlier this year.
The drop in coronavirus cases has been cited in decisions to lift restrictions, and, indeed, most states are down from their fall and winter peaks. However, the nationwide decline in case counts seems to be stalling at numbers that public health officials have said are still too high, prompting warnings that it’s too soon to drop restrictions.
Infectious-disease experts told Insider that while the dropping case counts were promising, it’s too soon to make dramatic changes in restrictions, especially when it comes to masks.
“It’s completely too soon,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, told Insider.
“It goes against the grain of what President Biden is trying to do, which is a national strategy that we never had,” he said. “COVID doesn’t restrict itself by state borders.”
Chin-Hong said individual states’ lifting mask mandates echoed the situation in the US last year, when he said the lack of a national strategy hindered efforts to restrict coronavirus transmission.
Even as President Joe Biden’s administration has ramped up vaccinations, Chin-Hong said coronavirus variants were a big concern.
“The vaccine rollout is progressing everywhere, but it probably won’t be able to protect the population fast enough,” he said.
The experts Insider spoke with all said there were encouraging signs, but that the US was still in a race to vaccinate before virus variants spread more widely.
The uncertainty of the variants
Chin-Hong said some states lifting restrictions are dealing with virus variants, including the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant. Several cases of that variant have been discovered in Iowa as well as a growing number in Texas.
But he called those cases only “the tip of the iceberg,” given the limited work being done to identify the variants.
The B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the UK, is known to be more transmissible than the original strain. British scientists have also become increasingly convinced the variant could be deadlier as well.
The variant has been detected in 46 states, and Chin-Hong said it would most likely be the country’s dominant strain by the end of March. If states continue to lift restrictions like mask mandates, it will increase the likelihood for B.1.1.7 to spread.
In states that have dramatically lifted restrictions, which now includes Texas, Chin-Hong said the virus was “probably having a party right now.”
B.1.1.7 is just one of many coronavirus variants circulating in the US and it’s possible more will emerge, making it an evolving issue with lots of uncertainty.
“We’re entering a phase where it’s harder to know what the near-term future is like,” Andrew Noymer, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at Irvine, told Insider.
He said his expectations for what would happen throughout the pandemic – such as the summer and winter surges – had largely been accurate. But, he said, for the first time he felt as if he really didn’t know what the immediate future would look like regarding the pandemic.
Racing to vaccinate
Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida, agreed it’s too soon to be lifting mask mandates.
“The thing is, we still have COVID circulating and don’t have the majority of people vaccinated,” she said, adding that while case numbers were lower than they were during the holiday surge, they’re still not at ideal levels in most places.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the US as of March 3. About 16% of Americans have received their first dose, while about 8% are fully vaccinated.
To reach herd immunity, an estimated 65% to 80% of a population needs to be immune.
The Biden administration is well on its way to achieving its goal of administering 100 million vaccine shots in its first 100 days, and it has plans to further ramp up vaccinations. The president said Tuesday the US will have enough vaccine doses for every US adult by the end of May.
But depending on distribution, it will take months for the doses to be administered.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is also Biden’s chief COVID-19 medical advisor, has said priority groups won’t finish getting vaccinated until sometime in April. And it could take until late summer for all eligible adults to receive their shot.
If the more-transmissible B.1.1.7 variant becomes the most common strain, that leaves a lot of time for it to circulate in environments with loosened restrictions.
“It is really a race against time,” Prins said.
Before dramatically lifting restrictions, she said, states should have a combination of low transmission as well as a high number of fully vaccinated people to reach a “balance where we feel like we’re not going to have widespread transmission.”
“We’ll get to that point,” she said. “But we’re not there yet.”
‘Masks should be among the last to go’
Despite concerns over variants, Noymer of UC Irvine said it’s reasonable for states to reevaluate restrictions as case numbers drop.
“People are getting antsy,” Noymer told Insider. “What you don’t want to have is a situation in which people don’t want to follow any restrictions because they feel it’s all too strict.”
Noymer said loosening restrictions could even have an overall positive effect in some situations. For instance, he mentioned California, where an outdoor-dining ban in the fall sparked outrage and even prompted some restaurants and local jurisdictions to flout the rules.
Noymer considers this a significant problem because it risks some restrictions being viewed as meaningless.
Gov. Gavin Newsom reopened outdoor dining in California late last month, prompting some to wonder whether the decision came too soon. But Noymer said it just brought the restrictions closer in line with reality in some places, which can go a long way in maintaining the public’s trust.
“I’d like to have these orders still have some meaning when in the fall we might face a new wave with variants,” Noymer said.
But as far as what kinds of restrictions can safely be lifted, he said “masks should be among the last to go.”
He said relative to other aspects of life that had been disrupted by the pandemic, masks were a minor inconvenience relative to their public-health benefits.
“We know that masking is really important for prevention,” Prins said, adding that to keep case numbers from rising again it’s crucial for people to continue wearing masks and physical distancing until more Americans can be vaccinated.
Masks could be one of the last parts of the pandemic to go away, as Fauci recently said it’s possible Americans will be wearing masks into 2022, even after life begins to look a bit more “normal.”
On Monday morning, Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia introduced a resolution at the Commissioner’s Court meeting – a meeting of all four of the Harris County’s commissioners, the officials responsible for the county’s roads, bridges, and policy budget decisions, moderated by County Judge Lina Hidalgo.
Harris County encompasses Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US, with over 4 million inhabitants. The Houston Chronicle reported that at least 1.4 million Houston-area households were impacted by Storm Uri and power grid failures, which lasted from February 10 to February 17.
In the aftermath of the deep freeze – which incapacitated much of Texas’ power grid, left millions powerless for a week, and killed at least 80 Texans – Garcia, the former Harris County Sheriff, called for the entire Public Utility of Commission of Texas to resign, and for Gov. Greg Abbott to “replace the members with dedicated and experienced individuals who can lead the agency out of its current state of failure.”
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Science said that at least 25 Harris County residents died during the deep freeze, with the toll expected to rise.
The PUCT regulates the Electric Reliability Council of Texas power grid. The PUCT failed to heed winterization warnings outlined by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2011, according to local news station WFAA. Garcia also said that Abbott, then-Texas’s attorney general in 2011, should have acted sooner.
Garcia’s resolution, which passed and was followed by harrowing testimonies from Harris County residents who lost loved ones, homes, and businesses, opened the door for conversations about how Harris County could move away from ERCOT to a new power grid system.
Insider spoke to Garcia about how Harris County is dealing with the aftermath of the freeze, and who should be held accountable. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Currently, what are the biggest needs right now for residents in Harris County at this moment?
We’re working to provide a response to all of the challenges of the community. And although, we’re still recovering from a winter freeze, the reality of it is – is that this is much more compounded from the fact that we were dealing with a pandemic before the winter freeze came in. So just like it was during the pandemic, the economy has been disrupted. And so providing people food, nonperishable food items, and water has been a critical mission drain almost the entirety of the pandemic.
But when you throw a winter freeze, an unprecedented historical winter freeze into the equation, now it’s become more food, water, and other essentials. But a unique one is the fact that we also have to help people get their plumbing problems addressed because although the city water lines are functioning and other main utilities are functioning, the water is drinkable. It’s safe. The problem is people cannot turn on their water lines at their homes. Even though they can live in those homes, they can’t turn on those water lines and get drinking water to their faucets because there’s lines inside their homes that have disrupted. And as a result, their homes have, or will receive water damage.
A “Product Limits’ sign is seen next to water shelves in a supermarket in Houston, Texas following winter storm Uri that left millions without power and caused water pipes to burst, on February 20, 2021. – Texas authorities have restored power statewide bringing relief after days of unprecedentedly frigid temperatures, but millions were still struggling on February 20, 2020 without safe, drinkable water.
Francois Picard/ AFP via Getty Images
Could you explain some of the maybe less directly visible, but still ongoing crises that are kind of coming out of this deep freeze and power grid failure?
Well, it is a lot of what we’ve already heard is that schools are disrupted. Some of the schools also received water damage. The vaccine process has become much more complicated because people are like, well, I had an appointment to go get my vaccine today, but I’m trying to fix my plumbing at home.
And then look, the state for some reason, has it in for struggling families, because now Sid Miller, the agricultural commissioner was cutting critical funding to food banks, like the Houston Food Bank is needed in order for us to provide fresh produce and non-perishable food items to the homes of families. And so there’s a lot of things that are moving that have made the overall process complicated. But these are the issues that are in the forefront of people’s minds. They’ve got to get their plumbing fixed. They want to get their vaccines, but they also get to feed their families.
Troy Watts, a senior lead technician with John Moore Services, holds a busted pipe following an unprecedented winter storm that swept across Texas and left many of its residents without power and water for multiple days in Houston, Texas on February 22, 2021. Despite the boil advisory being lifted, many residents are still unable to drink their water until a plumber can address the cracks in their pipes, which were caused by freezing temperatures.
Callaghan OHare/The Washington Post via Getty Images
On a state leadership level, where does the responsibility lie for how everything related to the state’s power grid was handled over the last few weeks, and in years prior?
Well, look. In 2011, the governor was then the attorney general, but he spoke up. He spoke up about the last winter freeze that we had in 2011. He inserted himself right in the middle of the conversation, although he was not the governor. And so the fact that he’s been in state government leadership for 18 years, it’s hard not to look at him and say that he doesn’t bear any part of the responsibility.
And then, as attorney general, he said, we’re going to look into this. We’re going to keep this from ever happening again. And then, we had some explosions in 2013, refineries. And now as the governor, he said, we’re going to look into this. It’s not going to happen again. And now more explosions in 2020. And I’m the commissioner now. And I know for a fact that he has not reached out to our office to say, what can we do to help? Here’s my plan. Here’s what I’m looking to do.
So consistently from 2011 as the attorney general, 2013 as the governor, 2020 as the governor, and then in 2021, with this freeze where his campaign donors are resigning from the Public Utility Commission, his former employee has resigned from the… or used to work in ERCOT and is part of the Public Utility Commission. The governor owns this debacle, from beginning to end with failed promises, failed leadership. And so look, with the time that we all had to prepare for this winter freeze, my precinct was able to acquire generators. We were able to make a plan to stand up warming centers. We were able to get employees to staff those warming centers to make difficult decisions with their families. We were able to get food and water.
The county had a broader warming center plan, but it didn’t work because those facilities did not have generators. So people who would have otherwise gone to libraries came to the precinct to warming centers because we were prepared. Imagine if I had the resources or repairs, the county had had the resources that the governor has at his disposal, what more we could have done to protect our residents? And so I’m sorry, I’m not trying to pick a fight, but the reality of it is he’s the governor. He’s appointed his donors. People he knows incredibly well, if not personally, to these critical areas of responsibility and leadership within the PUC. He has indicated as the attorney general that this freeze would never ever happen again. So I’m sorry, it’s happened again. He owned it in 2011. He owns it today.
A man looks for information on his cell phone as he rest at the George R. Brown Convention Center on February 17, 2021, in Houston, Texas.
Photo by Thomas Shea / AFP) (Photo by THOMAS SHEA/AFP via Getty Images
And in the context of the warming centers, both in your precinct and the county broadly, are you seeing or anticipating any kind of COVID-19 surges in the aftermath of the freeze?
Yes. Look, why were we telling people to think about celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s differently? Because we didn’t want the co-mingling of families. And as a result, the potential for superspreaders to occur at the community level.
It’s the same thing now. Look, pipes have busted. And if that had happened to my sister who takes care of my 97-year-old mother, do think I would say, sorry, go get you a hotel room? No, I would say, come on over to our house and then risk the potential, the possibility of my mother being infected. So this is exactly what we are concerned is going to happen in Harris County as a result of this freeze. Families are taking care of families. People are coming together. People are calling for, for lack of better words, strangers who are plumbers to come fix their homes. And all of this is bad. It’s a bad mix for trying to control the pandemic.
I’ve been following your push for Harris County to leave ERCOT. So I wanted to ask you about what you think that should look like, and then what the processes in place are right now, like what’s possible right now and in the near future?
Well, what it should look like is what the state government should have been looking at since 2011. We should have been thinking about how to make all counties much more resilient. But Harris County, because of our size, our place in the state and national, if not global economy, should have received some degree of prioritization. And so, we should have had a more robust winterization program and strategy, but we should have been looking at what if another major freeze to that of 2011 could have happened again.
Because that one, although not as severe as this one could have caused near similar challenges for us, if it had happened under the same details that had happened in 2011. So what this simply looks like is a robust, candid, and thorough discussion about what should the strategy look like? I’m not about doing a knee-jerk reaction to say, we’re going to unplug from here. I want a strong, thoughtful, strategic conversation that provides for resiliency, that provides for our business community to have a grid that they can depend on, in particular our refineries. Many of our refineries had to undergo emergency shutdowns because it became too late for them to realize that it was not a one-day freeze, but rather nearly a week-long freeze. And this was something that they were not prepared for. So they had to undergo emergency shutdowns, which are dangerous for everyone involved. The refinery workers, the surrounding community, and our economy in particular.
I’m keeping an open mind, and I want to bring thoughtful people into the conversation to see what this ought to look like. But the fact remains at this, we have three different systems. We have the West Texas system, the East Texas system, and then we have our ERCOT. So the fact that Harris County can’t think about our self-interest or that of our immediate region would be a failure. We would be doing exactly what the state has done. We would have failed on behalf of our citizens, our business community.
And look, we have seen failed promises on behalf of Attorney General Abbott, now Gov. Abbott. I’m not going to sit around and stay quiet and assume the state is committed to fixing this. So I have decided to take action here locally, and we’ll see what the cost involved could be. But we got to have this conversation because we know the state’s not looking out for us.
Surrounded by tarp and bedsheets, Evelyn Hernandez, 15, and her sister, Daeslyn Hernandez, 1, keep warm by the glow of a camping stove on their family’s front porch following an unprecedented winter storm in Houston, Texas on February 18, 2021. The Hernandez family lost power on Monday morning and are preparing for another deep freeze.
Callaghan OHare/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Are you bringing in experts from other states or federal regulators that work on this into this conversation as well, or is this all happening within the state?
No. In fact, I’m looking to get the federal government to be a part of the thought process. And so, I’m going to be reaching out to the Department of Energy, but I want to make sure that we’re bringing the smartest academics, the smartest industry people, and bringing in some of our local leadership as well, from some of our industries to have that conversation of what this could look like.
And look, I’m not looking for a quick fix because for something of this magnitude, there is no quick fix. But imagine what we could have gotten if, for the last 10 years, the state had made a commitment to fix it. I don’t know whether it’s going to take us 10 more years to fix it, but we lost 10 years in net action on this issue. So I’m looking to bring those people together and see where that leads us.
And what is another crisis compounding in Harris County in the aftermath of the freeze that people should be aware of?
Well, the reason that this is critical, is because there’s no doubt that there were businesses around the state, around the country that were looking to come to Harris County, Texas. Today, they may not because they cannot count on the fact that we were prone to power outages. They can deal with predictable rolling blackouts, like the East grid had. They had outages, but there’s were planned in 45-minute increments. And so, they have some of the similar infrastructure that we have, but they didn’t have the full power outages that we had. So the fact that the business community has to count on the light being on, on the lights working and electricity and power to fund their operations tells me that they may be rethinking the possibility of relocating to Harris County, Texas.
Secondly, I think there may be some businesses here in town saying we have flooded enough and we have had outages enough. Maybe we need to look to somewhere else in Texas or across the country to take our businesses. So to me, these are the potential long-term impacts of what has been happening here in Harris County. And look, Harris County has been under Republican control for decades, and we’re now bringing action to the table because I feel very strongly that had there not been a change in county government, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation once again.
A graduating student wears a money lei, a necklace made of US dollar bills, at the Pasadena City College graduation ceremony, June 14, 2019, in Pasadena, California.
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
US lawmakers are debating student debt-relief proposals, seeking help for people saddled with loans.
But the proposals on the table right now are not a comprehensive solution, experts say.
The problem is a cycle of student loan accumulation, and little education about how this debt works.
It’s a familiar sight each year: a sea of soon-to-be college graduates, seated in their caps and gowns, with families and friends watching proudly as they march, one-by-one, across the stage to receive their hard-earned degrees.
But for many of the 35 million student-loan borrowers in the US, the celebration is short-lived. Months out of college, their debts become due and payable, and for some, it will be a heavy burden.
Since entering office, President Joe Biden has encountered immense pressure to aggressively address the student-loan crisis.
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer in February announced a plan to wipe out up to $50,000 in student loans per borrower. But Biden dismissed it.
“I will not make that happen,” he said. “I’m prepared to write off $10,000 in debt, but not 50,” he said. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it.”
There is support for student debt relief across party lines. According to a national survey conducted by the Harris Poll in December, 55% of Americans favor total student loan forgiveness. And around 64% of respondents said they support writing off a fixed amount, like $10,000.
Education debt has been rising steadily for about a decade, experts told Insider. It’s also been holding people back.
“Students who graduate with debt may put off life milestones such as buying a car, owning a home, getting married, or entering certain low-paying professions like teaching or social work,” a 2006 report from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities says.
The problem persists, and has only gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shuttered businesses across the US and canceled out millions of jobs in the last year.
“Former students have not been able to get rid of their debt,” said Andrew Pentis, a certified student-loan counselor at Student Loan Hero by LendingTree. “So it grows with interest, sometimes multiplying over years, if not decades.”
Poor education about the dangers of debt
Too often, families of first-generation Americans reviewing financial-aid packages from colleges and universities don’t realize the loans they see being offered must be repaid with interest.
Other times, families think of education loans as “good debt.” They view it as “the price to pay for investing in your future, sometimes by getting a degree from a prestigious, but more expensive, school in order to climb the social ladder, Pentis said.
The government also doesn’t do enough to explain its federal student-loan options. “A large cohort of borrowers leave school without fully understanding the weight of their debt, or their options for repaying it,” Pentis said. “The government needs to take a more direct role in educating students about how to avoid federal student loans, not just offering them without explanation.”
High schools also tend to gloss over the topic, he said.
“The family that’s dead-set on paying six figures to send their child to the prestigious university,” he said, “might not have considered that spending two years at a community college before transferring to that better four-year school could cut their overall costs and borrowing significantly.”
Student debt is on the rise because college education is an industry in the United States, experts told Insider.
“Higher education operates as a free market,” said Chris Mullin, strategy director of data and measurement at the Lumina Foundation, an organization committed to expanding higher-education access.
“As a result,” Mullins said, “the cost a student pays can be set at what the market will bear.”
Peter Cade/Getty Images
The cost of tuition depends on a number of factors
College tuition is not regulated federally, and there are distinctions between the way private and public universities set them, which directly affects how much money students and their families will pay. Private university tuition costs are decided by the institutions themselves, student debt experts told Insider.
“Private schools obviously have more leeway when it comes to setting tuition and fees,” Pentis said.
That’s one of the reasons private institutions like New York University set much higher “sticker prices” on their tuitions than public colleges do. The sticker price is the tuition cost a student can expect to pay before grants, loans, and other types of financial aid kick in, which means not everyone pays the full or same amount for higher education.
And because private institutions have more leverage in setting tuition costs, the decision-making process behind it varies from one institution to another. This can lead to differences between the sticker price and the net price of tuition, with the net price being what a student ultimately pays for their education after financial aid has been applied.
Donna Desrochers, principal researcher at the education program run out of the American Institutes for Research, says higher-cost private universities may simply set those prices with the intention to subsidize the cost of tuition for students receiving financial aid.
“It may be that [for] NYU, or any other school, the higher price is taking some of those full-pay dollars from full-pay students, and trying to reallocate to provide aid for other students,” Desrochers said.
Meanwhile, public-university tuition, which is typically more affordable, is set by individual states.
“Perhaps they have a lower sticker price, and maybe they’re not reallocating as much aid to students,” Desrochers said.
Sticker prices are a type of “complex marketing,” according to Desrochers
“It’s kind of like an airline, right? And people compare it to that, sometimes. You’re paying different prices for different seats, depending on when you purchased it. And so, it’s quite similar,” she said. “They’re trying to attract the class that they want.”
Sticker prices also help institutions maintain their costs of operation, Desrochers said. Public colleges benefit from raising sticker prices, especially when states are contributing less money to higher-education budgets.
“That pays for less of the institution’s costs,” Desrochers explained. “It actually ends up shifting those costs onto students.” Because of the recession brought on by the coronavirus, Desrochers expects to see states investing less in higher education, leading to institutions shifting those costs onto students instead of trying to minimize their spending.
“We see it every time after a recession,” she said.
This means, overall, institutions “give substantial grant aid,” said Mullin, the Lumina Foundation strategy director.
Student debt-relief measures are still needed
Collectively, student-loan borrowers in the US owe more than $1.7 trillion. Trillion with a T. So conversations about how to address that debt will continue.
They will go a long way in helping borrowers “who don’t have much of a chance to end their debt on their own,” Pentis said.
But no relief measure will address the source of the problem: brand-new student loans.
If students and family members don’t recognize the dangers of accumulating large amounts of debt at high interest rates, the pattern of rising student debt will continue, experts warn.
While tuition costs are not a federal decision, the government has two levers to pull to encourage colleges to alter tuition rates, Mullin said.
The government can change the amount of money it makes available to a single student or change who is eligible to get financial aid. That way, students will have fewer restrictions like part- or full-time status to receive federal aid. Schools might then give larger aid packages to students, Mullin said.
Additionally, the government can “provide consumer information” with the goal of disclosing data and supplying comparison points intended to help students make informed decisions about their college education.
“It can inform the public by effectively placing a warning on institutions, like the US Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes,” Mullin said.
“This kind of ‘warning’ can take the shape of a requirement, for example, that institutions make public the workforce outcomes of their programs,” he said, effectively showing students what kind of return on investment they can expect after graduating college.
Demonstrators protest outside the US Citizenship and Immigration Service office in Miami, on February 20, 2021, demanding that the administration of US President Joe Biden cease deporting Haitian immigrants back to Haiti.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
Activists want Democrats to use their majorities to provide permanent relief to undocumented immigrants.
They expect two bills to be introduced to protect Dreamers, TPS recipients, and farm workers.
Executive actions to protect immigrants have been subject to conservative legal challenges.
Democrats now control the House and the presidency, and narrowly control the Senate, and activists want them to use their power, and with any means available, to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation.
“This is our time,” Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, said on a conference call Wednesday. Her group – a youth-led immigrant rights organization that claims 400,000 members – is calling on Congress to pass the Dream & Promise Act, legislation that would prohibit the federal government from deporting those who came to the United States as children, as well as anyone who has received Temporary Protected Status after having fled a natural or man-made disaster.
President Joe Biden has pledged not to deport members of either group, but unilateral executive action is always subject to legal challenges; a 100-day total moratorium on deportations, for example, was recently overturned by a conservative judge responding to litigation from Texas’ Republican attorney general.
“Our movement delivered a clear political mandate,” Martinez Rosas, an immigrant from Mexico who has lived in the US since she was a young child, said on the call. Democrats have “a moral and political obligation to see it through,” she argued, adding that the legislation should be passed without any compromises that see more funding go toward border enforcement.
Introduced in 2019 by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, the bill passed the House, with the support of all Democrats and seven Republicans, but went nowhere in the GOP-controlled Senate. Activists expect it to be reintroduced shortly in lieu of the comprehensive reform package proposed by President Biden, which would provide a path to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented immigrants.
“We are saying clearly to Democrats that they must use every available pathway, including legalization in the upcoming COVID jobs package, and any other effort to ensure that we have protections for undocumented people,” Martinez Rosas said.
Under the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program, many immigrants who came to the US as children are eligible to obtain work permits and protection from being forcibly removed from the country. But DACA requires its recipients to renew that protection every two years; the lack of permanency exacerbated by shifts in the political landscape.
Joella Roberts, a DACA recipient who came to the US as a child from Trinidad and Tobago, said it’s a mark of progress that that legalization is on Congress’ agenda, reflecting “the growing power of our movement.” And she praised lawmakers for ensuring that misdemeanor convictions – and possession of marijuana – would not make one ineligible. But, she said, “I would be remiss if I did not mention our disappointment with the criminal bars that are still in place.”
Activists also expect Democrats to introduce another measure that could provide a pathway to citizenship for around one million undocumented farmworkers and their families. Votes on both pieces of legislation are expected before the House’s March 22 recess.
“It is long overdue for Congress to recognize the integral role that immigrants play in our communities and in the nation for food security,” Andrea Delgado, government affairs director at the United Farm Workers Foundation, said Wednesday. “We look forward to the imminent introduction of these bills and to sending them over to the Senate, where we will continue to build power and demand change.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (center) visits with Barbara Alexander of Bedford as she receives her COVID-19 shot from Arlington firefighter Andrew Harris at a mass vaccination site inside the Esports Stadium Arlington & Expo Center in Arlington, Texas, Monday, January 11, 2021.
Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News via AP, Pool
Gov. Greg Abbott announced plans to reopen the state “100%” and lift Texas’s mask mandate.
Dr. Natasha Kathuria, a doctor based in Austin, Texas said “we can’t let our guards down this soon.”
“We are not ready to roll back our mask mandates or open up to 100%,” she said.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Tuesday that he would lift Texas’ mask mandate and reopen the state “100%” starting next Wednesday, but a Texas ER doctor says the state is “nowhere near” its goal of herd immunity in order to safely reopen.
Dr. Natasha Kathuria, an emergency medicine physician based in Austin told Insider that lifting health safety restrictions “is a very dangerous message that the governor is sending to Texans that may have dire consequences.”
In January, Texas became the first state to administer one million doses of the vaccine and had administered 5.7 million vaccines by the time of the Tuesday announcement. But as the second-largest state in the country, “only 7% of Texans have been fully vaccinated as of today, with about 13% receiving one dose,” Kathuria, who has expertise in public health and epidemiology, said.
“That’s nowhere near the goal of 75%, which would achieve herd immunity,” she added.
Kathuria told Insider that lifting the state’s health safety guidelines was a “devastating” blow to the state’s medical community – one that comes just after the devastating winter storms that slammed Texas last month.
As hospitalizations and cases improved with the vaccine rollout, the ER doctor said there was a “new sense of hope as a very palpable weight of fear was lifted off our shoulders.”
Icicles hang on the back of a vehicle Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, in Houston. A frigid blast of winter weather across the U.S. plunged Texas into an unusually icy emergency Monday that knocked out power to more than 2 million people and shut down grocery stores and dangerously snowy roads.
David J Phillip/AP
“But before we knew it, we were blindsided by a new tragedy – the Texas freeze of the century,” she told Insider. “This hurt us in a way that COVID-19 never did, paralyzing many of our hospitals, shutting down labs, halting water and power to some of our hospitals, and preventing ambulance transfers, while leaving millions upon millions without heat, water, or power.”
“We’re still seeing the fallout of that storm. Patients who couldn’t get medical care during the storm are now presenting with debilitating conditions over a week later,” Kathuria continued. “And COVID-19 is still here, still circulating, and still causing suffering.”
Experts told The New York Times that conditions caused by the winter storm could have contributed to the doubling of infections in the state, which grew from a seven-day average of 4,412 cases on February 20 to 7,693 by Monday.
“While our daily vaccination rates are higher than ever and our medical community has been giving our all to fight this infection, we are not ready to roll back our mask mandates or open up to 100%,” Kathuria told Insider. “We have come so close to the finish line in America and we have the end in sight with vaccines rolling out faster than ever, but we can’t let our guards down this soon.”
Abbott’s announcement to reopen the state comes a day after Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned states not to reopen too soon as coronavirus variants continue to spread.
Kathuria said she urges her fellow Texans to heed the advice of scientists, saying she is seeing the suffering caused by COVID-19 “first-hand in every shape and form in my ERs.”
“We must come together as a community to ease that suffering on humanity,” she said. “I urge our citizens to please heed the scientists during these times and during these matters of science. We must heed to the experts: the epidemiologists, physicians, virologists, researchers, and the CDC.”
Last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he regretted reopening bars too soon in the early months of the pandemic, which led to spikes of COVID-19 infections in the state.
“If I could’ve done anything differently it would’ve been to delay the opening of bars,” Abbott told local news outlet WFAA last June. “The opening of bars, if I recall correctly, was around the Memorial Day time period.”
“And in hindsight, that should’ve been delayed,” Abbott said, “especially now knowing how rapidly coronavirus could spread in the bar setting.”
The reopening takes effect next Wednesday. It includes restaurants and bars.
“With the medical advancements of vaccines and antibody therapeutic drugs, Texas now has the tools to protect Texans from the virus,” Abbott said in a statement. “We must now do more to restore livelihoods and normalcy for Texans by opening Texas 100 percent.”
“Make no mistake, COVID-19 has not disappeared, but it is clear from the recoveries, vaccinations, reduced hospitalizations, and safe practices that Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed,” he continued.
However, being the second largest state in the US, Texas is far from enough vaccinations to allow a safe and full reopening, according to Dr. Natasha Kathuria, an emergency medicine physician based in Texas who has expertise in public health and epidemiology.
“This is a very dangerous message that the governor is sending to Texans, that may have dire consequences,” Kathuria told Insider. “Only 7% of Texans have been fully vaccinated as of today, with about 13% receiving one dose.”
“That’s nowhere near the goal of 75%, which would achieve herd immunity.”
Abbott’s announcement comes a day after Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned states not to reopen prematurely as coronavirus variants continue to spread in communities.
“Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” Walensky said during a press briefing at the White House on Monday. “These variants are a very real threat to our people and our progress.”
“Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of COVID-19 in our communities, not when we are so close.”
