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Texas Jeff

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Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. 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..."
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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."
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Australia is currently in their flu season and they are having a low year, so you may be right.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Washington Rednecks. Offend a different group of folks for a while.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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....
  22. In 1800, every elector got two votes. They were both votes for President. Whoever got the most votes was President, 2nd place got VP and a set of steak knives, 3rd place was you're fired. Very GlenGarry. Jefferson and Burr ran together as Democrat-Republicans against the incumbent Federalists. It was the first election with presidential tickets. All of the Jefferson/Burr electors voted for Jefferson and Burr. The plan was to give Jefferson one more vote, making him president and Burr VP. Somehow the plan did not work and they tied. This threw the election in the House of Representatives, where each state got one vote. They voted again and again but Jefferson kept getting 8 of 16 votes and he needed 9 to win. On the 36th ballot he got 10 and won the election.
  23. Small clarification that may be obvious ... that paper thing is not a receipt, it is your ballot. At least in Travis County, all the voting booth is doing now is presenting your choices on a touchscreen and transferring your choices to paper. Once you get the ballot back with the choices on it, you must put it in the machine at the exit for your vote to be scanned and counted. I voted at the Austin Rec Center near House Park and it was really well run. Everyone got a finger condom to put on before you signed in and a popsicle stick to use on the touchscreen. Looks like Travis County is going for big gyms as voting places rather than small rooms and there were plenty of machines to use to mark your ballot. The average age of the poll worker was down about 50 years. There was no wait and no line to vote.
  24. I think (going off memory) there are a number of east side schools that are around half full, even with 100% attendance ... although I do believe there are probably east side campuses that need more space because of COVID. Some campuses are closed because they are being rebuilt as new schools. Maybe they need to keep the old schools open for a year to use the space. Schools like O'Henry and Austin High already have sizable transfer populations from east side attendance zones, they are not just west Austin kids.
  25. If they do that, it would be a lot cooler if it was a statewide effort. Or just the major metros doing it in sync. I would like to see the science behind a 35 day shutdown rather than 14 day or 21 day or other intervals. For example, what do they expect to happen and can we measure against that to see what does happen, to inform future shutdown decisions. A planned shutdown of a fixed duration seems less disruptive than the reactionary closings and the date-driven reopening we tried before. I give the city council a lot of grief for decisions I don't like, but at least they are trying to turn the dials they have.
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