This past Tuesday, March 2nd, Texas governor Greg Abbott made an executive order

which lifted the mask mandate and increased the capacity of businesses and facilities to 100

percent. And businesses are freaking out. Many are trying to decide if they should still require

masks or not, though they fear they’ll lose customers either way. Many places are still going to

keep the masks mandatory; however, they don’t want to have to deal with the backlash of the

customers who do not wish to wear them. The new mandate doesn’t take effect until March 10th,

so businesses should have time to figure out what they’ll do, but I’m sure that people will stop

wearing masks starting now.

While cases have been down there, there have still been an average of 7,000 to 8,000

cases every day for the past week, and just a month ago there were more than 20,000 cases a day.

By taking away the mask mandate, they’re simply going to increase their case numbers. On the

day that Abbott made this order, there were almost 60,000 cases in the country. If other states

follow in his footsteps, it could be disastrous. Up to 450,000 cases have been prevented by wearing masks as of June of last year, and that was only three months after quarantine started. So, since then, masks would have prevented thousands of more cases. However, what’s bound to happen is that when people get vaccinated, they’re going to want to stop wearing masks. But then couldn’t everyone just say they’re vaccinated? We’re in some strange grey area where some people are vaccinated but a lot still aren’t, but there’s no way of really seeing who’s who.