New COVID Guidelines Collide With Brazilian Strain In North Texas

DALLAS —To paraphrase Paul McCartney, maybe it's a maze.

Every time America turns a corner in its struggle to return to something like life pre-2020, that corner turns out to be another step in our public health labyrinth.

Earlier today, the CDC issued new guidelines for fully vaccinated Americans in public, stating that those who've passed the two-week mark after their second injection (or first, in the case of the single dose J&J vaccine) can go maskless when dining outdoors or in small gatherings out in the open.

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That good news is now tempered with reports that a new Brazilian variant, P1, has been detected by scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center Dallas. Compounding the problem: a discernible decline in vaccinations — which suggests that Texas may have hit a wall in which everyone who's wanted a vaccination has been inoculated. That means only the hesitant and anti-vaxxers remain.

The new variant is just as worrisome as the British variant that's become so prevalent across the country, and for the same reasons. According to researchers, the Brazilian variant is more resistant to both vaccines and treatment, and is more easily spread. Medical experts maintain that the best way to stave off new variants is to achieve herd immunity — which, of course, requires that the public buy into the logic of being vaccinated.

It's a race in slow motion then, with no clearcut winner. On one side, there's the virus, which knows nothing and only acts on a genetically programmed impulse to survive. On the other is a fatigued and often misinformed and skeptical public who only want to return to The Before Times.

Take all those variables, then factor in the governor's lifting of COVID restrictions and the CDC's new mask mandate guidelines, and you have a recipe for mystery that rivals anything on Netflix.

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