Bexar County, TX (San Antonio) will be requiring all businesses to require customers and employees to wear masks: EXECUTIVE ORDER: Masks will be required inside San Antonio area businesses | WOAI
This will surely be implemented in other large TX cities. This isn't as terrible as lockdown--when it was illegal to run a business or have a friend over for dinner--but is still disappointing. I was naively optimistic that we were exiting our period of COVID hysteria and moving onto other things, but I think this guarantees we will be kept in this state of panic well into next year: the rise in "cases" and hospitalizations are easily explainable in benign ways (e.g. more people are being tested especially in high-risk areas, more people are going to hospitals for elective surgeries or to report symptoms and are being tested for COVID on entry, etc) but that's all it took for masks to become de-facto law. For the mask laws to be lifted, what would be necessary? No new cases? Seems unreasonable as we test more and more.
And of course, once October rolls around, every sneeze and flu-like hospitalization will immediately trigger feverish demands for lockdowns.
I'm in Austin and we're going to get hit hard by this regression back into fear. Considering renting an AirBNB out in the hill country and just waiting this out. Wimberley seems nice. Maybe if Biden wins in November the panicked half of the country will suddenly have a change of heart and allow for life to be enjoyable again.