Texas Jeff

7 day moving average of hospital admissions. Check out their dashboard here: https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/0ad7fa50ba504e73be9945ec2a7841cb

Allow me to save you some time and consternation, at least for football. After years of watching high school football from the other sideline, I think I can go ahead and call it... Y'all can flip a coin with LT for the district championship. The rest of us will draw lots for the last two playoff slots. You can have the small school playoff spot and LT will take the big school spot. The two other schools will prep to be obliterated in first round games. No need to play until a vaccine is here. If the playoffs start Feb 1, you'll still be playing in mid-March. Just get ready for the playoffs .. thank you for not crushing us this year.

Austin ISD has a plan to rebuild almost the entire school district over the next 30 years. It's not a perfect plan but it is a good plan. They want to do it without raising the tax rate, with a new bond package every five years or so. They plan to do it by issuing new bonds as they pay off old bonds, but without jacking up the tax rate. They were very careful during the last bond to keep the tax rate used for construction unchanged. If the city keeps raising taxes for billion dollar tunnels and hundreds of millions for bike lanes and sidewalks, the school district will have a harder time later convincing people to raise their taxes even more. The $460 million on the ballot for bike lanes and sidewalks could build 10 new elementary schools serving about 8000 children, about 10% of AISD. Half of those would be economically disadvantaged kids sitting in brand new state of the art schools. The property tax rate can not just climb forever. People will move to the suburbs to escape the taxes. The sprawl that the transit folks don't want will happen. I was pro-public transit until a few years after the Red Line opened. I was an Austin Monorail supporter way back when. I don't have faith, after watching the city dig the Waller tunnel, watching the city go over budget on the library and after watching ridership on the Red Line fall short of projections, that the city and Cap Metro can deliver the projected ridership at the proposed cost. I hope I am wrong.

This is about CodeNext, or changing zoning in the City of Austin. Adler has seven votes but needs nine. Before COVID hit, the city was trying to adopt a new zoning plan. This plan was previously called CodeNext. During the CodeNext debate, the mayor had around five solid votes for CodeNext, maybe a 1-2 more. In 2018, Ora Houston and Ellen Troxclair were replaced on the city council with two council members friendly to zoning reform. CodeNext came back, but it was renamed the Land Development Code Revision. Throughout 2019, votes for the LDC revision typically passed 7-4, with the same 7 people for and the same 4 against. The four against were Pool, Alter, Tovo and Kitchen. They represent central Austin districts, mostly in the middle and west sides of town. Their districts were going to see a lot of change because of CodeNext. If this passes, developers will make a lot of money tearing down existing homes in Central Austin and replacing them with smaller condo or apartment like units. These units might be three homes where one stands today, on a 50 ft lot, or as many as 10 units in a small apartment building in a "transition" zone on one lot. Reduced parking was also an issue, since some of the denser units required little or no parking. No on-site parking assumes people either go carless or park in the street. There were changes citywide (at least two homes per lot allowed on many lots, for example). In the fall of 2019, the plan passed the planning commission and it later passed the first two readings at city council. Three readings are required to approve it. State law says that a city considering a zoning change must give the citizens notice of the change and must allow them a way to protest the zoning change. The protest can be overridden by three-fourths of the city council. The city knew this but did not follow the law. They asked a city lawyer for an opinion that stated that since the zoning change was citywide, this state law did not apply. The lawyer wrote such an opinion. Many citizens tried to protest anyway, by sending protests to the email address the city provided for LDC comments or mailing the city protest letters. A group sued the city and won. The judge said that the planning commission decision was not allowed, because they did not send notices, and the first two votes on the city council reading were not allowed, because they did not allow citizens to protest. The city decided to appeal the decision, and the appeal is pending. So, Adler now needs nine votes, not seven, to deny citizens their right to protest changes to zoning and proceed with CodeNext. Alternatively, he could win the appeal or compromise with the four on the other side. Or ... he could try to get rid of his opposition and replace them with supporters. I assume from reading her website, that Witt would be another vote for Adler on CodeNext, giving him eight votes. If Adler gets to nine, he and city staff can design whatever zoning map they want, pass it, and Austin citizens will have no ability to protest zoning changes. If he does not get to nine, he will have to wait for the appeal, compromise to get to nine votes, pass the plan and allow citizens to protest, or do something else. Since he was OK with ignoring the protest law before I suspect he will try to get to nine votes. So, if you want to force Adler to compromise with the people that represent the districts where a lot of the change is proposed, you should consider voting for Pool. If you want the zoning change as is ... or maybe even more change ... with no citizen power to protest ... you should take a look at Witt.

Newman will get it done ... the mail never stops. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night nor the president of the United States stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds..."

Which would be a more morally correct way to spend $2 billion in Austin? A 1.5 mile tunnel so that trains and buses don't have to mix with cars for 1.5 miles... ... or invest about $100,000 per AISD high schooler to completely modernize or rebuild ALL of our high schools and make them the best schools in the area? ... I'm talking $280 million for Bowie, $240 million for Austin High, $290 million for Akins, and so on. Every high school kid in the district massively benefits. Now, the tax bases are not the same, some RRISD and other ISDs are in the Austin city tax base, but the tunnel we are talking about here is going to benefit one small area. It would be a lot cheaper to just kick cars off of the 1.5 miles and make it transit only ... and spend the money to transform the lives of the next generation. Give them the education they need to get some of the tech jobs coming to our town.

Man, who knows at this point... Few would have predicted the sharp rise in June after a relatively flat May and I think few at the end of June were thinking we would have a peak in mid-July. Personal behavior is driving this thing. I predict we will have 100-200 deaths per day in Texas throughout August, which means 3000-6000 Texas deaths in August. Probably more Texans dead this month from COVID than died in then Vietnam War. The real ballgame is what happens from mid-August through early October. How does behavior change when college kids are back on campus, some kids are back in school, and some colleges are trying to host tens of thousands of people at football games? I think we have learned to gradually beat back the virus the way we are living this summer, but life is about to change because the calendar says it is time to change. Our reaction to that will drive the numbers in October and November, which could either dwarf August numbers or decay to not much, based on behavior.

So about a payroll tax holiday. Payroll taxes fund social security and Medicare. A large part of his base is on social security and Medicare. Seems like the Dems just have to repeat "Trump defunded SS and Medicare and he wants to make those cuts permanent" and the olds will freak out.

The data for Texas is showing a little bump in cases that started about a week ago but is now easing. Is it possible that this was caused by July 4th get-togethers? If so, that sucks, because it means that an event that causes a spike does not show up in the data for a month. With that kind of lag, any type of opening plan has to go really really slowly. Make a change, wait a month, see if you are screwed, make a change, wait a month, see if you are screwed, etc. I don't think we have the patience for that. The number of daily tests is dropping, which is curious. Are people feeling less of a need to get tested, or believing that testing is useless so why do it, or are the labs running out of supplies to process tests? It would be nice to know the average latency of a test, from request to result, and how that is trending over time.

Do you think one of the astronauts has to just sit there and wait while the other guy struggles to get his crap out of the overhead bin?

BTW, today is day 150 of COVID in Texas ... first case reported in Texas was March 4th. If a vaccine is available on Jan 1, 2021, we have 154 days to go. It is going to be a long, long fall.

Trends are good but we have a long way to go. If you look at other examples around the world, the outbreak rise time is shorter than the fall time. In Travis we have to eliminate 80% of the today's disease level we have now just to get back to April/May levels. And April/May levels set us up for June when things got out of hand. Hopefully we get back to April/May levels (about 50 cases per day for Travis Co). Hopefully people keep their masks on and avoid crowds. Hopefully some folks now have antibodies to help out. Then, we have a chance to contain it and be rid of it. Take your foot off the brake too soon and we will be right back here again. Transmission may jump with cooler weather and there is no guarantee of a vaccine. I know that's a bunch of gloom but we do see trends turning in our direction. We have the power to make this go away, but we need to maintain the will.

All numbers that I track in Travis County are headed in the right direction. They are about 4x higher than they were in May but are declining. It will take a big decline just to get back to May levels. Texas as a whole is starting to level out but not drop yet. In April and June, we had this really long plateau where things were not getting worse but they were not getting better. We will see where the current numbers settle, but hopefully they just keep sinking lower and lower and do not plateau. What we are doing is working but complacency will kill the trend.

It's shenanigans ... something changed at the fed level that caused some Texas hospitals to stop reporting to DSHS. From the DSHS covid tracking page: "DSHS is reporting incomplete hospitalization numbers today due to a transition in reporting to comply with new federal requirements. For July 23, 84.5 percent of hospitals reported complete data to DSHS, resulting in a partial data set and the appearance of a drop in hospitalizations. DSHS continues to work with Texas hospitals during this transition to ensure all facilities can fully report the data required."

Back in May, Texas was somewhere around 44th among states in COVID cases per capita and was below the national average. After a lot of hard work by our fellow Texans, we now rank 18th and are above the national average. Among the states that are above average, we have the lowest per capita testing rate. Oklahoma has a much lower per capita COVID rate and a higher per capita testing rate than Texas.

The NY Times is reporting the Trump administration told China they have 72 hours to close the Houston consulate. They are burning documents before they leave.

Australia is currently in their flu season and they are having a low year, so you may be right.

Healthweather.us (the wifi thermometer guys) is showing big declines in rate of spread for Texas. Compare June 19th with July 20th Their calculated Travis County Rt values: June 19th - 1.13 July 20th - 0.92 Above 1 things go to crap and below 1 it goes away, eventually. As a recap, Abbot gave support for fines on June 17th, closed bars on June 26th, and issued the statewide mask order on July 2nd. All of that is working. There is a way out of this, using Cloth Age technology and spreading out until the vaccine cavalry arrives.

Fans on metal bleachers are just going to slide towards the 50. Or, if upstairs head for nicer seats downstairs or on a lower row. Or get under shade.

The NY Times has a map up showing your chances of encountering people all wearing masks in five random encounters: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/17/upshot/coronavirus-face-mask-map.html They polled 250,000 people asking how often they wear masks and used the data to create a map showing which areas of the country probably have more mask wearers.

Washington Rednecks. Offend a different group of folks for a while.

Good news, healthweather.us (data from Kinsa wifi thermometers) is defiantly showing a cooling COVID trend throughout Texas. They project a real-time R value based on who knows what, but yesterday it dropped at or below 1.00 for many Texas counties after rising as high as 1.14 in June. Thermometer data is a leading indicator. Hopefully case counts will follow. C'mon Texas you can do it ... keep masking up and spreading out ... our efforts are having an effect.

I was thinking more about at the leadership level, admin, TEA, nationally. The teachers are caught at the end of of a rope that is flailing about. ISD leadership is sending one message and TEA is sending a different message that seems likely to lead to sick parents and teachers. It looks uncoordinated and unplanned to me, at the leadership levels. I am sure teachers are doing what they can to try to do the best for their students.

This idea of "hey let's get the kids back in the classroom" followed by six weeks later "oh crap the school is full of COVID shut it down" followed by six weeks later of "hey let's get the kids back in the classroom" followed by six weeks later of "we are out of teachers a lot of them are really sick, everyone go to the gym and work on busy work" followed by "thank god the holidays are here" is going to really really suck. We had the perfect setup to control this and we failed. This thing cranked up right before spring break, which was easy to extend. Most of the important stuff for the year was already done so we had some time to learn how to learn online. Then we had summer break to polish ideas about how to handle this and maybe have a little less corona with the heat. And we have squandered ALL of that. The plan seems to be try to go back to normal with some PPE and hand washing and see what happens.

Some Texas county numbers from yesterday with a few countries tossed in for comparison: Dallas Co: 1,029 Bexar Co: 845 Travis Co: 753 Harris Co: 701 France: 663 Tarrant Co: 595 Nueces Co: 445 Germany: 410 El Paso Co: 393 Spain: 383 Hidalgo Co: 335 Canada: 267 Galveston Co: 254 McLennan Co: 246 Italy: 193 Japan: 193 Australia: 131 Texas, our Texas ... cough cough cough cough cough cough....