MRT: S. TX Virus Surge?; State: COVID-19 Deaths Based on Death Certificate; Paxton Case Delayed Again; Young to Lead HHSC; Abbott Extends Early Voting
Here's What You Need to Know in Texas Today.
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BY: @MattMackowiak
TUESDAY – 07/28/20
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TOP NEWS
"Cleanup from Hanna spurs fear amid COVID-19 surge in Texas,"AP's John L. Mone and Juan A. Lozano -- "As recovery and cleanup efforts got underway Monday in South Texas in the wake of a downgraded Hanna, worried residents confronted the prospect of undertaking the effort amid a surge in coronavirus cases that has left many fearful about their health.
Now a tropical depression, Hanna was 65 miles north of Fresnillo in the Mexican state of Zacatecas as its winds weakened to about 25 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. Its remnants still threatened to bring rainfall and flash flooding to waterlogged parts of South Texas and Northern Mexico.
For 66-year-old, Nora Esquivel, who has mostly stayed in her home in Weslaco, Texas, in Hidalgo County since March because of the pandemic, flooding damage to her home from Hanna meant greater chance of exposure to the virus.
“No contact with nobody, only my daughter once in a while, and now with this, I have to allow people to come into my house, the insurance and all this and I’m scared,” said a tearful Esquivel, who takes heart medication and had to be rescued from her home Sunday morning by her son on a kayak.
“All my friends are dying. ... I have fear for my family, for everybody, not just me and this is the whole world.”
In the aftermath of Hanna, which dumped up to 16 inches of rain in some parts of South Texas and Northern Mexico, officials reported two people died in the northern Mexican city of Ramos Arispe, near Monterrey, after torrents of water unleashed by Hanna swept their vehicle away. Three people were reported missing in Monterrey and three more were missing in the border city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, according to Mexico’s national civil defense office.
Gov. Greg Abbott said the state was sending additional testing supplies and hospital personnel to South Texas communities impacted by Hanna to ensure the storm doesn’t exacerbate the spread of the virus.
“The spread of COVID can be far more deadly than the damage caused by the storm,” Abbott said on KRGV-TV. He planned to tour damaged areas Tuesday.
The governor asked residents to adhere to social distancing guidelines and to wear masks if they had to leave their homes and go to a shelter. Officials said shelters were set up to be as safe as possible, with temperature checks by on-site medical personnel. Some were being sheltered in hotel rooms.
Border communities hit by Hanna were already strained by COVID-19 cases — with some patients being airlifted to larger cities.
Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday that “in a strange way” the hurricane might have helped with the county’s recent surge in COVID-19 cases because the storm made people stay at home.
In Cameron County, located next to Hidalgo County, officials said they were grateful the hurricane did not overwhelm their hospitals, which continue dealing with a crush of COVID-19 patients.
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., the county’s top elected official, said there were reports of at least 150 flooded homes and some roadways were still impassable due to high water, but for the most part the county was doing well.
“I think we’re very fortunate the storm did not bring major, major flooding and no loss of life,” he said.
But Cameron County officials remained concerned about the pandemic, as cases in the past week have increased by 2,587 — more than the total from mid-March to July 1. The county has more than 7,800 cases. Deaths have increased by 81 in the past week, Treviño said. A week ago, the county had 96 deaths.
North of Cameron County in Nueces County, Corpus Christi reported that 60 infants tested positive for COVID-19 from July 1 to July 16.
“The storm hasn’t made (COVID-19) go away,” said Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni, adding officials remained concerned Monday about the number of local coronavirus cases, including 16 deaths over the weekend.
Coastal states scrambled this spring to adjust emergency hurricane plans to account for the virus, and Hanna was the first big test.
Abbott announced Sunday the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved an emergency declaration that will provide federal aid." AP
"Texas' count of coronavirus deaths jumps 12% after officials change the way they tally COVID-19 fatalities,"The Texas Tribune's Edgar Walters -- "After months of undercounting coronavirus deaths, Texas’ formal tally of COVID-19 fatalities grew by more than 600 on Monday after state health officials changed their method of reporting.
The revised count indicates that more than 12% of the state’s death tally was unreported by state health officials before Monday.
The Texas Department of State Health Services is now counting deaths marked on death certificates as caused by COVID-19. Previously, the state relied on local and regional public health departments to verify and report deaths.
Public health experts have said for months that the state’s official death toll is an undercount. State health officials said Monday that the policy change would improve the accuracy and timeliness of their data.
Texas law requires death certificates to be filed within 10 days.
“This method does not include deaths of people who had COVID-19 but died of an unrelated cause,” the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a news release." Texas Tribune
STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT
"State releases COVID data for Texas assisted living facilities, nursing homes,"The Dallas Morning News' LaVendrick Smith -- "Texas health officials began providing comprehensive coronavirus data Monday for nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, state-supported living centers and state hospitals.
The data, posted online for case and death counts for nursing and assisted-living facilities statewide, cover only through July 13. But the Health and Human Services Commission said it would update the numbers by 3 p.m. on weekdays.
The numbers come months after Gov. Greg Abbottdirected several state agencies in May to test all residents and staff members in Texas nursing homes, which have been particularly vulnerable to the virus. About a third of coronavirus-related deaths in Dallas County are linked to long-term care facilities, officials have said.
So far, 356 people have died in nursing and assisted living facilities across nine North Texas counties, though officials warned the new information the state is gathering is provisional and subject to change. Timing and other factors could cause the data to be different from the data a provider self-reports.
More than 270 residents from nursing facilities across Dallas, Collin, Rockwall, Tarrant, Denton, Johnson, Ellis, Kaufman and Parker counties have died from COVID-19, the data show.
Keller Oaks Healthcare Center, a nursing home in Keller, has reported 81 cases, including 20 deaths, among residents, according to the data. Brentwood Place One, a facility in Dallas, reported the most residents infected with 113. It said 14 of its residents have died.
About 80 residents of assisted-living facilities in the nine counties have died from COVID-19, according to the state’s data.
Monticello West, an assisted-living facility in Dallas, was the hardest hit in the area after reporting 20 residents have died from the illness. The facility also has had the most cases among assisted-living facilities, with 36, according to the data.
It was one of several facilities Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins noted at a news conference in March at the outset of the pandemic when he warned of clusters of cases in the homes and called on residents to remove their loved ones from them if they could.
“When these [viruses] get into the nursing homes, they spread and they spread rapidly,” Jenkins said at the time. “You’ll get into a situation where virtually everyone there has a very high chance of getting it.”" Dallas Morning News
"Paxton criminal case, now 5 years old, delayed again,"The Austin American-Statesman's Chuck Lindell -- "The criminal case against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, held up for five years by numerous challenges and appeals from both sides, was pushed farther back Monday by a state appeals court in Houston.
The 1st Court of Appeals, responding to a challenge from the appointed prosecutors in the Paxton matter, overturned a Harris County judge’s order that had returned the case to Collin County, where Paxton resides.
The case had been transferred in 2017 to state District Judge Robert Johnson in Harris County after prosecutors argued that pretrial publicity, and actions by Paxton supporters, meant they could not get a fair trial in Paxton’s backyard.
Paxton’s lawyers challenged the transfer, and on June 25, Johnson returned Paxton’s case to Collin County, ruling that a prior judge lacked the jurisdiction to transfer the matter to the Houston area. Johnson also stepped away from the case, saying he was added to a bail reform lawsuit and accepted representation from the attorney general’s office, and the Paxton case was reassigned to state District Judge Jason Luong, also of Harris County.
Based on that recusal, the 1st Court of Appeals on Monday abated Johnson’s ruling and returned the case to Luong, giving the new judge 45 days to reconsider the transfer order because the Paxton case is now Luong’s responsibility." Austin American-Statesman
"Cecile Young to lead Texas Health and Human Services Commission,"The Texas Tribune's Emma Platoff -- "Cecile Young has been named the new head of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission as the agency fights an ever-growing number of coronavirus cases in the state.
Young, who has more than three decades of experience working in state government, including several top roles at HHSC, will take the helm of an agency of nearly 37,000 employees as it navigates a worsening pandemic that has seen Texas become a national hot spot, a years-old crisis in its care for foster children and ongoing criticism of its contracting procedures. She will start in mid-August.
“Cecile will provide immediate leadership to help solve the health care challenges facing our state during this pandemic,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, who announced Young’s new role Monday.
Young has worked since the late 1980s at a number of state agencies under several Texas governors, at the Texas Attorney General’s Office and in the Texas House of Representatives. She worked at the Health and Human Services Commission in the early 1990s after the Legislature created it, helping launch the fledgling agency, according to her LinkedIn page. And she was acting commissioner of the agency during the summer of 2018.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic presented unprecedented challenges for the agency, HHSC has had to navigate years of shifting leadership. Courtney Phillips led the commission for just over a year before leaving to take the top job at Louisiana’s health agency. Phillips’ last day was March 13, less than a week before Texas announced its first coronavirus death." Texas Tribune
"Texas organizers say local police did not protect protesters," via AP-- "Community leaders say local law enforcement in Texas did not protect protesters from opposing groups after weekend rallies turned violent.
Local law enforcement disbanded a protest in Weatherford over the removal of a Confederate monument, saying it was unlawful after a confrontation with counter-protesters. But organizer Tony Crawford, of Parker County Progressives, said police did not seem to know what to do and failed to protect the protesters.
Crawford’s group and Fort Worth-based Enough is Enough coordinated the protest on Saturday that supported removal of the statue. The groups had planned to march from a city park to the Parker County Courthouse. But they were met with hundreds of counter-protesters who thought the statue would be damaged.
Some in the crowd carried Confederate flags, yelled racial slurs and threw water bottles, Crawford said.
“It got to a point where I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to get everybody out of there safely,” Crawford said. “We don’t want to touch that statue because anything that happens to that statue is going to get blamed on me.”
Jim Webster, a former Parker County commissioner, was among the counter-protesters. He said citizens stood up to bullies that came to take down their statue.
Videos show a counter-protester punching a protester in the head. Others show a counter-protester brandishing a knife and a man charging into protesters.
Parker County Judge Pat Deen said two people were arrested. Weatherford police did not immediately respond to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s request for comment on Sunday.
Deen said the state chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy owns the statue and they are planning to move it to another location once they can fund the move.
Deen said the county commissioners will hold a special meeting Thursday “to agree and approve the statue can remain” till that group has the funds to move it.
On Sunday, a Portland Protest Rally and a Back the Blue Rally in Tyler turned violent. Democratic congressional candidate Hank Gilbert of Tyler held the original rally, while a Back the Blue Rally started later on the downtown square.
One person was choked, a woman said she was punched and Gilbert’s campaign manager Ryan Miller was cut on the face. Supporters of Gilbert’s opponent, Congressman Louie Gohmert, brutally beat and assaulted Miller, according to Gilbert’s campaign staff’s Sunday press release.
But supporters of President Donald Trump said they were provoked.
Tyler Police took statements from protesters, but Gilbert said that was not enough.
“The Tyler police were idly driving around the square in their patrol cars, and waving at the counter-protesters who were heavily armed,” Gilbert said.
Andy Erbaugh, the department’s public information officer, said officers responded quickly and no arrests were made.
Gilbert is calling on Governor Greg Abbott and the city of Tyler to investigate the Tyler Police Department." AP
2020
"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s election postponement leads to confusion over ballot filing deadlines,"The Houston Chronicle's Nick Powell and Jay Root -- "Most cities in Texas — from Galveston to Lubbock — moved their May elections to November under a pandemic-era decree by Gov. Greg Abbott.
But the choices facing voters will remain limited to candidates who filed for office months ago — at least for now.
State Rep. Mayes Middleton, a Galveston County Republican, wants to reopen the filing period for candidates to lead cities and other political jurisdictions, including school boards. He believes voters may have soured on incumbents facing little or no competition.
Middleton is asking Attorney General Ken Paxton whether the state should give candidates who want to run in a postponed local election until mid-August to file for a spot on the ballot.
“I think it’s also only fair that this occur because there are a lot of people that have been frankly unhappy with how some of the decisions… have been made in local government during this pandemic,” Middleton said." Houston Chronicle
"Ahead of Trump's 16th visit to battleground Texas, yet another poll shows he trails Biden," The Dallas Morning News' Todd J. Gillman -- "Another day, another poll showing that Texas is up for grabs despite President Donald Trump’s bluster.
Former vice president Joe Biden leads 47-45, with only one in 20 voters still undecided, in a Morning Consult poll released Monday night.
A raft of recent polls have found a dead heat, with the candidates within a point or two, and Trump returns to Texas on Thursday for the 16th visit of his presidency – an investment of time that would be out of proportion if Texas were as safely in his column as he professes.
In Odessa, he’ll meet with campaign donors before heading to Midland to inspect an oil rig at Double Eagle Energy and give a speech about energy policy.
A Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll released July 12 showed Biden leading by 5 percentage points.
“We’re many points up in Texas,” Trump said the next day. “Fake news. Phony polls.”
A CBS/YouGov poll from the same weekend that found a statistical tie, with Trump leading 46-45 – still far worse than any polls in the final months of the 2016 campaign.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last Wednesday showed Biden leading 45-44. The same poll from early June had Trump leading by 1 point.
With his campaign foundering and national and battleground state polls showing an increasingly difficult path to a second term, Trump demoted campaign manager Brad Parscale this month.
The replacement, Bill Stepien, insisted Friday that Biden has no chance in Texas, a state Republicans cannot win the White House without.
“I would invite the Biden campaign to play in Texas,” Stepien told reports in a state-of-the-race briefing. “They should go after Texas really, really heavily – you know, spend a lot of money in the Houston and Dallas media markets.”
Biden started running ads in Texas about two weeks ago, a one-minute spot urging Texans to wear masks and noting that “people are frightened” as the COVID-19 pandemic rages.
At the time, the Trump campaign called the outreach to Texas a “pipe dream.”
Trump’s last visit to Texas was only last month: a June 11 campaign-style event on police and race relations at a North Dallas church.
His 9-point margin over Hillary Clinton in Texas 2016 was the worst showing by a GOP nominee for president since 1976, when President Gerald Ford lost Texas and Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter ousted him from the White House.
Texas Democrats accused Stepien of “false bravado” belied by polls showing that “Biden is going to beat Trump in Texas.”
Morning Consult Political Intelligence surveyed about 2,600 likely voters in Texas from July 17 to July 26. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points." Dallas Morning News
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
"US won't expel migrant children detained in Texas hotel,"AP's Nomaan Merchant -- "The Trump administration has agreed not to expel a group of immigrant children it detained in a Texas hotel under an emergency declaration citing the coronavirus and will instead allow them to seek to remain in the U.S., the administration said Monday.
The move comes days after The Associated Press first reported on the U.S. government’s secretive practice of detaining unaccompanied children in hotels before rapidly deporting them during the virus pandemic. Government data obtained by AP showed the U.S. had detained children nearly 200 times over two months in three Hampton Inn & Suites hotels in Arizona and two Texas border cities.
But the Trump administration has not said it will stop using hotels to detain children. The legal groups that sued Friday night said they still plan to fight the larger practice in court.
Their agreement only covers 17 people known to have been detained as of Thursday at the Hampton Inn in McAllen. After the hotel’s owner said Friday it would end reservations of rooms used for child detention, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed the children from the hotel but refused to say where it had taken them.
Now, immigration authorities will transfer the children to shelters operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where they will have access to lawyers and should eventually be placed with family sponsors as they pursue asylum cases or other immigration relief to try to remain in the country. The legal groups withdrew their request Sunday for a temporary restraining order.
“The children in this hotel averted disaster only because we happened to hear about them before they were deported, yet hundreds if not thousands of other children are being sent back to harm in secret,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The government must stop expelling children in secret without giving them asylum hearings.”
Federal anti-trafficking laws and a two-decade-old court settlement that governs the treatment of migrant children normally require that most children be sent to shelters operated by HHS. The shelters are licensed by the states where they’re located and generally have bedrooms, recreation areas, and schooling.
Instead, more than 2,000 children have been expelled since March, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a declaration allowing immigration agencies to effectively shut down the asylum process out of concern about the spread of COVID-19.
The AP found that contractors paid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have held children as young as 1 in Hampton Inns. ICE called the contractors from MVM Inc. “transportation specialists” and refused to confirm whether they had passed FBI background checks or had backgrounds in child care. Instead, it said the contractors were “non-law enforcement staff members trained to work with minors and to ensure that all aspects of the transport or stay are compliant” with the court settlement known as the Flores agreement.
An advocate with the Texas Civil Rights Project who walked through the Hampton Inn in McAllen on July 17 saw people in scrubs going room to room on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel caring for children. The advocate, Roberto Lopez, said he saw one small child holding onto a gate in a doorway as an adult on the other side played with him.
On Thursday, video posted by the project showed one of its lawyers trying to enter the fourth floor to find children. The video shows three men in plainclothes confronting him, then shoving him back and slamming him into an elevator wall.
The records indicate the children were not accompanied by a parent but don’t say more about the circumstances of their crossing the border. In the past, some very young children have been brought by older siblings or other relatives. Others have been sent by parents waiting for their court dates in refugee camps on the U.S.-Mexico border with hopes they will be placed with relatives." AP
"US testing czar Brett Giroir, following vaccine work at Texas A&M, faces uphill fight on COVID," The Houston Chronicle's James Osborne -- "After a career working his way through the ranks of the Texas medical sector, helping develop Texas’s A&M University’s federal contract to mass produce vaccines, Brett Giroir seemed an obvious pick to run the federal government’s coronavirus testing program.Now, four months after the coronavirus pandemic hit U.S. shores in earnest, Giroir, assistant health secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, is coming under fire as the United States struggles to get its testing regime in order.
While the number of tests being conducted is increasing steadily, the nation’s medical labs are being overwhelmed, public health experts said. Laboratories across the country are reporting a shortage of supplies, from the swabs they put up patients’ noses to the chemical solutions known as reagents upon which testing equipment relies, delaying data critical to controlling the spread of the disease.
Giroir acknowledged the problem in an appearance on CNN Sunday morning, in which he said it was taking too long for patients to find out if they had tested positive for COVID-19.
“The delays that most people talk about are at the large commercial labs that perform about half the testing in our country,” he said. “We need to continually improve our ecosystem.”
U.S. laboratories and state health agencies are competing against each other for supplies, raising calls for the federal government to step in, as governments in Europe and Asia have done, to take control of the supply chain.
But so far Giroir has resisted efforts to nationalize the U.S. COVID-19 testing effort, preferring to leave final decisions on testing and most coronavirus response to state officials, many of whom - like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott - have resisted health experts’ advice on the grounds of defending personal liberty and reopening the economy.
Meantime, patients are waiting between five and six days on average for their test results with some waiting more than a week, said Josh Sharfstein, vice dean at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.
That leaves those infected with COVID-19 to delay quarantining and further spread the disease among their social circles and limit the effectiveness of contact tracing efforts.
“Results need to happen in a day or two. If it’s taking five to six days, it’s already been passed on,” Sharfstein said. “There’s no federal control of the supply chain. we’ve let everyone fend for themselves, with everyone competing against each other. It’s been shockingly inefficient.”
As a result, medical researchers, who advise politicians on shutdowns, quarantines and other policy to contain the virus, are chronically trying to catch up.
One only need look at Giroir’s former employer, Texas A&M, where he served as vice chancellor and then CEO of the university’s hospital and medical research facility until 2015.
Going into July 4 weekend, Rebecca Fischer, an epidemiologist at A&M, had been worried about a repeat of the statewide spike in cases that followed Memorial Day.
More than three weeks later a spike in the data had yet to materialize, but Fischer knew with the disease’s incubation time and up to week-long delays in getting laboratory results back it could very well be the data simply hadn’t caught up.
“When a person becomes infected, its five to six days before they start to see symptoms and then a day or two until they see a clinician and then we see the testing delay,” she explained. “When we look at data we’re not seeing today’s situation, we’re seeing a week ago’s situation. And the problem is the more people we send to be tested the longer the delay in reporting back to patients.”
How much of the delay in testing results should be laid at the feet of Giroir - a longtime pediatrician and former chief medical officer at Children’s Health in Dallas - versus the president himself is difficult to parse. Since ordering the production of ventilators through the Defense Production Act in April, Trump has resisted efforts to order similar steps for other equipment.
“You know, we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business. Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well,” he said at a press conference in March.
If Giroir has any problem with that point of view, so far he’s kept quiet." Houston Chronicle
REMAINDERS
HOUSTON ASTROS: "Bregman's 100th homer helps Astros beat Mariners 8-5" AP
TEXAS RANGERS: "Non-retro Rangers new home next-gen park with classic touch" AP
'MACK ON POLITICS' PODCAST
LATEST "MACK ON POLITICS" PODCAST: John Solomon is our returning guest for the 197th episode.
John is the co-author of the new book, “Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties”.
In this conversation, we explore the purpose of the book, what the central revelation is, how Uranium sales and Ukraine fit in, what he’s learned about the Steele Dossier, what his reporting has found about Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, what he expected from the Durham Report, what questions he still has about the false Russian collusion story, how he answers his critics, and why he started his own news site.
Available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher and on the web at http://www.MackOnPoliticsPodcast.com.
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