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(Pexels)
Despite the good news of a COVID-19 vaccine being administered in Austin starting today, local health officials painted a grim picture of disease spread locally that they attributed to the "Thanksgiving effect"—and warned that Christmas gatherings could cause a case surge on par with El Paso.
During Tuesday's Travis County Commissioners meeting, Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said that if Austinites didn't start making safe decisions now, the next two or three weeks could produce an aggressive surge.
With the effects of Thanksgiving gatherings giving way, Austin's moving case average hit 339 today, a 45% increase from the beginning of the month. Escott said the Thanksgiving surge was very concerning for health authorities and a repeat around Christmas could be disastrous.
"It is a concern for us because if we see surge happening now because of Thanksgiving and we see a repeat of that activity during Christmas. We really have the risk of having an El Paso or Lubbock type of substantial and catastrophic surge," Escott said. "We really do need folks to be more cautious."
Furthermore, with cases still rising, Escott said Travis County might be heading for a Stage 5-level shutdown before the end of the year. Travis County is expected to exceed 50 daily average ICU admissions by the end of this week, the threshold for Stage 5.
"This is not a forecast of what will happen," Escott said. "This is what could happen. This is the most likely scenario if disease transmission stays the way it has been."
Though Travis County still has the lowest amount of active cases and deaths than a lot of other major counties, COVID-19 will become the third leading cause of death for 2020 by the end of the year.
Looking at projections of age groups, every age range is higher than the threshold should be. However, Escott pointed out that even though 20-29 and 30-39 groups have seen a spike in cases, the hospitalization rates in those groups are very low.
Members of the 20-29 and 30-39 age groups are most likely to attend social gatherings and go to bars, where Escott said the risk is greatest. Escott said that is where a lot of virus transmission originates.
"This is what we were concerned would happen and it's in fact happening," Escott said. "We cannot sustain this kind of growth in cases for much longer. We certainly can't sustain this kind of impact post-Christmas."
Escott said the most efficient way to stop the spread is to return to the roots of the pandemic: staying home, avoiding social gatherings and not taking your mask off in front of anyone that you don't live with.
As of today, Austin hit a 9% positivity rate, up from 7.4% last week. Plus, Escott said with increased testing and new data coming in, they expect the number to go higher.
"I really don't know how to make the message any more clear that what we're doing now as a community is not working," Escott said. "This is going to be a memorable Christmas for folks for the wrong reasons. We are going to see unprecedented levels of cases and deaths in this community between now and the end of January if we do not take action right now."
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Popular
Miami and Austin are going head-to-head for tech transplants. (Pexels)
California expats and industry experts say Austin remains the bigger draw for Californians, especially those in the tech sector, but warn that this advantage could shift to Miami if the city doesn't address the policy challenges that prompted the migration in the first place: housing affordability.
"If Austin doesn't accommodate this influx, I think all the talent will come to Miami," said Peter Yared, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Miami from San Francisco in September. "I think Miami's going to be the one that sucks it all up."
Push factors
Both Texas and Florida promise business-friendly state tax policies, and their governors tout the relocations of companies such as Tesla and Oracle from California. But Darien Shanske, a law professor at the University of California Davis whose specialties include taxation, said this is a red herring because corporate taxes are based on where sales occur rather than headquarter locations.
This is not to say other state policies are irrelevant. "The area in which California regulatory policy has been, in my opinion, not a complete failure but problematic … is housing policy," Shanske said. Austin and Miami can offer "not cheap, just cheaper" housing than what is available in Silicon Valley. Plus, both cities are developing a critical mass of talent, which further draws Californians in. "If you're a software engineer, you want to live near other software engineers," he added.
But not every Californian is motivated to move. "San Francisco is a fantastic place to live if you can afford it," said Brandy Aven, a professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. As a result, it's more common for what she called the labor—engineers, programmers and even company founders—to relocate to cities such as Austin and Miami than the monied venture capitalists. Burgeoning tech cities may find that they need to develop homegrown investor networks to support local ventures in the absence of Californian transplants, but she believes this is doable.
Pull factors
Paul O'Brien, CEO of the Austin-based MediaTech Ventures and a startup veteran, moved to Austin from California in 2009, during the Great Recession. "I'm a firm believer that the world has been seeking an alternative to Silicon Valley for a long time," he said, pointing to Austin as the natural heir for myriad reasons.
Austin has regional appeal as the epicenter of three of the country's largest cities—Houston, Dallas and San Antonio—and their respective industry niches. Tech entrepreneurs could cater to the local consumer goods industry or Houston's oil and gas sector. Plus the city has cultural appeal, thanks to the Red River District and South by Southwest, which made it attractive to job seekers. "The whole reason everyone moved to Silicon Valley is opportunity," O'Brien said. "The whole reason people are now looking beyond Silicon Valley to somewhere else is opportunity."
It's less clear what Miami's key industries are, O'Brien said, but the city offers other selling points, including the mayor's buy-in and "a tremendous depth of wealth" to support a technology and startup ecosystem.
Although Yared didn't consider moving to Austin, he is aware of its appeal to engineers, especially now that their hero, Elon Musk, has moved there, shunning California. "Austin has a lock on tech," he said, but Miami draws a different crowd, including financiers from New York. This parallel migration, coupled with the city's more outwardly pro-growth building policies, gives him hope that Miami could supplant Austin in the coming years. "In the end, communities get to choose what they want," he said.
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