Posts Tagged ‘Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale’

Time To Reopen Texas

Saturday, April 18th, 2020

After weeks of people clamoring to reopen Texas’ closed economy, and after President Donald Trump unveiled his own guidelines for states to start reopening their economies, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has issued several directives to get the Texas economy up and running again.

  • First he established a “strike force” to advise on reopening Texas, headed by three medical professionals (John Zerwas, MD, Executive Vice-Chancellor for Health Affairs at the University of Texas System, Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and Parker Hudson, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Dell Medical School). I think the makeup of the strike force itself is way too heavy on CEOs and light on small business owners, with a few exceptions like Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Balous Miller (owner of Bill Miller Bar-B-Q).
  • He authorized a phased reopening of businesses starting April 24, maintaining school closures throughout the rest of the academic year. Bars, restaurants and gyms still closed for in-house service.
  • He loosened restrictions on elective surgery, a good thing, since hospitals had started furloughing staff.
  • Further loosening will depend on the data. These are hardly reckless moves.

    The entire point of the lockdown was to bend the curve to the point that cases didn’t overwhelm the hospital beds needed to effectively treat them, especially the ICU beds needed to treat the worst cases. The latest data indicates that it probably did just that. Peak Texas coronavirus resource usage was actually on April 15th.

    We have ten times as many cases recovered as deaths.

    In Harris County, Houston has one the largest caseloads of Wuhan Coronavirus in the country, but the current caseload is well below bed and ICU bed capacity. In Travis County, they have three times as many beds as confirmed cases.

    With mask production up and hydroxychloroquine continuing to show results in trials (hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain), we now have a lot more weapons to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus, even if cases increase. The economy can’t wait the 6-12 months for an effective vaccine to be developed. We have the capacity to address additional infections, and (if need be) reverse course if there’s a huge infection snapback.

    It’s time to reopen the Texas economy.