The number of coronavirus hospitalizations, as well as the seven-day average of new deaths and cases, have remained reasonably stable in Texas since Gov. Greg Abbott (R) allowed the state’s stay-at-home order to expire on April 30 and began a phased reopening process for non-essential businesses.
Texas’s single-day number of cases and fatalities have also remained relatively steady since the stay-at-home order ended.
The Democrat-allied mainstream media continues to provide doomsday scenarios for states that reopen, claiming it is premature to do so now.
Despite a significant increase in testing, however, Texas has not experienced a severe spike in cases, hospitalizations, or deaths linked to the illness caused by the coronavirus, COVID-19.
The number of cases tends to increase with the availability of more tests as more people test positive, but that has not been the case in Texas.
Analysts consider the number of hospitalizations to be an essential measure of the severity of the ongoing outbreak, mainly because a lack of testing has skewed other metrics.
The seven day average of new deaths has also remained relatively stable and has not changed much since the day before reopening, data compiled by the New York Times showed on Friday.
According to Worldometer, the 1,578 coronavirus cases per one million in Texas is about one-third of the national average of 4,477 per one million.
The 45 deaths per one million Texans are more than 80 percent lower than the national average of 267 fatalities per one million.
Two weeks after Abbott officially ended the shutdown in Texas there were thousands of hospital beds available as of Friday, data compiled by the Harvard Global Health Institute showed.
COVID-19 patients only occupied three percent of the total number of beds as of Friday. That number has stayed stable over the last two weeks, reaching a maximum of 3.4 percent, data from Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard revealed.
Abbott told Breitbart News on April 18 that Texas, the world’s 10th largest economy, is “the economic engine of America” and must reopen.
The interview came a day after the governor had launched a series of executive orders to begin phasing in the immediate reopening of the Texan economy ahead of schedule.
On April 27, Gov. Abbott announced that he was planning to allow the state’s stay-at-home order to expire on April 30 and let businesses to begin a phased reopening the following day.
The governor did allow parks to reopen and elective medical procedures to resume in the days before lifting the shutdown order.
On the day before reopening, about nine percent of the tests administered in Texas came out positive, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
That positive rate dropped to seven percent on Friday and has remained stable, reaching no more than an estimated eight percent since Abbott lifted the Texas shutdown mandate.
Texas’s current rate is half of the national average for people testing positive, which stands at about 14 percent.
According to the New York Times, there were 1,233 single-day new cases on April 30, the day before reopening.
The number of daily cases increased to 1,347 on May 14, with the figures fluctuating between those two days.
However, the figures appear to have leveled off, data from the Times and Johns Hopkins revealed.
Since the end of the lockdown, the daily cases have not exceeded the peak of 1,475 during the quarantine. Texas did experience its second and third highest number of daily cases after the end of the lockdown — on May 13 (1,473) and May 12 (1,360), but the figure dropped back down yesterday.
According to the data compiled by the Times and Johns Hopkins, the number of daily deaths has also remained relatively the same without any significant spikes since April 30.
That day, Texas experienced its deadliest day (52 fatalities) since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Yesterday, the daily number of fatalities reached 51, the second deadliest day.
The number of daily fatalities has fluctuated between the end of the shutdown and now. However, it has not exceeded the peak number of deaths on April 30.
According to Worldometer, the number of tests per one million people in Texas, at 22,387, is lower than the national average of 33,281.
In Texas, the cumulative number of cases (45,198), deaths (1,272), and tests (645,992) continue to go up, Johns Hopkins data showed as of Friday evening.
Overall, however, the COVID-19 outbreak in Texas appears to be stable so far since the Abbott lifted the stay-at-home order.
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