A&M virologist expects state to be ‘a little more dangerous’
Ben Neuman, one of the world’s top experts on coronaviruses, has been studying the things for 24 years. He’s the Global Health Research Complex chief virologist at Texas A&M University. He’s a funny, genial explainer of science, but when we started talking about reopening Texas, he got serious fast.
Q: Gov. Greg Abbott is reopening Texas on March 10 and lifting the mask requirement. Should we still wear masks anyway?
A: Should we reopen Texas now? (Laughs.) That’s the bigger question.
Q: OK. Should we reopen Texas now?
A: No. That’s the short answer. We don’t even have an accurate count of how many cases there are. The case numbers are right now artificially low, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. We know they’re artificially low because the number of deaths was going along at a particular rate, then it went down to zero for that week where everything was frozen, and then it came right back up as if nothing had happened. Normally, with glitches in state data, they collect all the ones that fell through the cracks and dump them all at once, usually on a Friday night, and then we have a spike of 30,000 cases.
We have not had that yet. We have not corrected from the data fallout basically.
Q: So that means the COVID numbers in Texas are higher than we think?
A: They’re definitely higher, but nobody knows how high, including the governor — which is why this was a weird time to basically hold the parade for the end of COVID. We’re not quite done yet.
It’s a recipe for social pressure against mask-wearing, and Texas has had trouble with mask compliance right from the start, bless them. I don’t think this is going to make anything better.
You’d have to talk to epidemiologists to figure out how many more people are likely to get infected, and how big the spike is likely to be. Cases are rising to some extent — that’s just places that weren’t able to report starting to report — but it’s really anybody’s guess as to when those cases were logged and how many of them are getting through now.
Q: The governor is emphasizing individual responsibility. Now all the decisions are up to us: We have to be our own epidemiologists and virus experts and assess our own risks. Why do you think that’s not a good idea?
A: The governor is also putting county judges in the place of your local epidemiologist, when everybody also has some form of a county, local or state Department of Public Health, essentially. There are people whose job it is to know this stuff and to make these decisions, and they are not in the loop on this one. That is a questionable choice, I would say, from a scientific point of view.
As for personal responsibility/ personal freedom, the problem is that this is not an individual risk. You can’t get COVID on your own; you have to get it from somebody else. Whether or not you get it depends both on whether you wear a mask and whether they wear a mask. There are cases like one up in Vermont, where one person was wearing a mask, three other people were not wearing masks, and the masked person still caught the virus.
In scientific terms, we’re playing fast and loose on this one.
Q: So we shouldn’t relax, shouldn’t change how we’re behaving?
A: Oh, my goodness, no. If anything, Texas is going to be a little more dangerous in terms of COVID in the coming weeks. I would say extra caution is probably warranted. We should certainly be cutting down our potential exposure as far as possible.
I guess we have yet to see how this is going to play out — to what extent people were only going along with mask regulations because the governor said so, as opposed to because it’s an epidemiologically and scientifically sound thing to do.
Q: So some people have been vaccinated. Does that change the game?
A: Some have; 7 ½ percent have been fully vaccinated at the moment. Every day it’s more — but we’re nowhere near herd immunity.
It’s a good question whether or not we can get to herd immunity. Even if we have vaccine and we convince everyone who is (eligible) to be vaccinated, we still have the problem that very young people aren’t eligible — everybody under 16 isn’t eligible for one vaccine, and under 18 for the others.
That’s a sizable part of the herd that is very definitely catching the virus and is able to spread it. So I don’t think, with the current climate, you would be able to get herd immunity by only vaccinating adults.
We’re waiting on one of the clinical trials to come through so vaccination of children is allowed. So yeah, herd immunity is gonna take awhile, and I’m not sure if we’ll get there if vaccinations are the only thing we do to interrupt transmission.
Q: If you’re one of the lucky few who are fully vaccinated, how much can you change your life? Should you still be wearing a mask when you’re in public?
A: Yes, definitely — any time you are not in your house with just the people who live all the time in your house. It’s not time to change this.
We’re at about a 9 percent test positivity rate right now in Texas. We’re not doing quite as well as Ghana or Belarus. We’re a little better off than Peru.
But most industrialized countries with vast resources and health care and testing, like we have available, are doing a much better job of containing this.