Greg Abbott Surrenders to the Coronavirus
Updated at 10 a.m. ET on August 12, 2021.
A year and a half into the pandemic, Texas is running out of hospital beds.
The Texas Tribune reported on Tuesday that nearly 10,000 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalized, and that the state’s intensive-care units are being overwhelmed. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order asking hospitals to delay elective procedures and authorizing local facilities to seek out-of-state medical staff to help with the coronavirus surge, which is approaching levels not seen since winter. Despite the desperate situation, Texas’s case rate is not even the worst in the nation—Louisiana and Florida have more cases per capita.
The coronavirus pandemic should have been over by now, but instead the U.S. is facing what some medical experts as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Last week, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff held a press conference urging residents to get vaccinated, showing that close to 90 percent of new infections are among the unvaccinated, who in turn make up 95 percent of hospitalizations. Out of the of the coronavirus from February 8 to July 14, just 43 were known to be vaccinated. In other words, unvaccinated people constituted 99.5 percent of coronavirus deaths in Texas during that period.
