It’s been a year since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in the United States — a very long year. And a new pair of polls suggests that Texans have become more pessimistic about the state in general, as we stumble through a public health disaster that has already claimed more than 36,000 lives in Texas and over 430,000 nationwide.
Four out of five Texans know someone who has contracted COVID-19, and half know someone who has died because of the disease, according to a new poll by the nonpartisan Texas Lyceum. More than a third of respondents identified the pandemic as the most crucial issue facing the state. And few Texans have confidence that our state can get back to normal, as things stand; 70 percent say containing the virus, rather than re-opening the economy, should be the priority. (Full disclosure: I served on the Lyceum board from 2013 to 2016).
“Texans tend to be bullish on Texas, both currently and looking to the future,” said Joshua Blank, a political scientist at the University of Texas and the Lyceum’s research director. “The scope and depth of the pandemic and its economic consequences have really shaken that Texas bravado.”
A similar sense of malaise emerges from another poll released this week, from Texas 2036, a nonprofit organization focused on the challenges facing the state as it approaches its bicentennial. A jarring 87 percent of Texans are concerned about the future of the state, it found. And 47 percent of Texans said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned. That’s up from just 31 percent a year ago.
Most Texans, according to this poll, want the Legislature to take some kind of action in response to the pandemic, now that the biennial regular session is underway. But their hopes aren’t high. The poll found that prior to the pandemic, half of Texans rated the state government’s ability to respond to problems as “good” or “excellent”; now, just 36 percent feel that way.
AJ Rodriguez, Texas 2036’s executive vice president, told me that the surge in concerns about the state’s future is probably tied to the drop in confidence about how our leaders will respond. Overall, he said, he interpreted these results as “more of a plea” from voters, who would be heartened to see lawmakers from both parties work together on issues such as education and workforce development as well as health care.
“There are some things that are absolutely going to be out of control of our leaders, but I think the public is saying there are some things that are in your control,” Rodriguez observed.
The vaccine rollout falls in that category. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced that the United States has ordered 600 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans, and that his administration will boost the number of vaccines being sent to the states each week. He had previously announced that his administration would seek to administer at least 100 million of those doses in the first 100 days of his presidency.
His approach marks a change from the rather desultory attitude of the federal government under former President Donald Trump, who frequently played down the severity of the pandemic and seemed content to leave the states to fend for themselves when it came to testing strategies and acquiring PPE.
Still, the vaccine rollout in Texas has been shambolic to date. Millions of Texans who are eligible for vaccines under phases 1A and 1B of the state plan have been scrambling to find appointments via a patchwork system of local governments, their regular health care providers and private chains — which collectively have fewer doses available at this time than they need. Overall, according to a new report by the Houston Chronicle, Texas ranks 49th out of 50 states in terms of vaccines received per capita to date. (Texas has received more than 3.5 million doses of the vaccine and, according to state officials on Thursday, administered more than 2 million doses; the state has nearly 30 million residents).
All of this presents a challenge to state leaders such as Gov. Greg Abbott, who has been careful to stipulate in his occasional tweets on the subject that the vaccine is “always voluntary.” That’s an accurate note, but one that fails to convey a sense of urgency and definitely doesn’t capture the frustration many Texans are feeling as they endlessly refresh their Internet browsers, hoping to find an available appointment.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — a conservative firebrand, but sensitive to public opinion — raised some of these concerns in a Jan 21 letter to Imelda Garcia, an associate commissioner for the Department of State Health Services and chair of the state’s Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel.
He argued that we need to “refine” the state’s vaccination rollout plan, with two goals in mind: to ensure that we are vaccinating Texans in the highest-risk categories, and to give all Texans some peace of mind.
“Too many Texans are spending long days physically standing in line, calling a phone number repeatedly, and spending hours online, trying in vain to get a vaccination appointment,” Patrick wrote. “I believe we must bring more predictability to the process, so Texans can gain a more appropriate expectation of when they will be able to get their vaccination.”
It’s intriguing to hear a leader such as Patrick reference our expectations. We typically don’t expect state government to do much, do we? Even now, there seems to be little appetite among Republican legislators for proposals to support struggling communities by, for example, expanding Medicaid, a cost that would mostly be borne by the federal government. But if state leaders can’t even provide a smoother vaccine rollout, Texans may start wondering why.
“I don’t think that the pandemic has fundamentally changed Texas politics,” Blank said. “But if the state fails to get the coronavirus under control, along with the rest of the country, in some reasonable amount of time, I think all bets are off.”
erica.grieder@chron.com
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January 30, 2021 at 06:07PM
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