A big question following Monday’s announcement that Gov. Greg Abbott was allowing the reopening of restaurants, retail, malls, and more was whether employees who felt unsafe showing up to their place of work would still qualify for unemployment benefits. Abbott provided guidance on Thursday afternoon: concern alone will not be enough to continue your benefits if you are called back into work.
You will have satisfy one of the reasons below to remain on the rolls of the Texas Workforce Commission:
• At High Risk: People 65 years or older are at a higher risk for getting very sick from COVID-19.
• Household member at high risk: People 65 years or older are at a higher risk of getting very sick from COVID-19.
• Diagnosed with COVID: The individual has tested positive for COVID-19 by a source authorized by the State of Texas and is not recovered.
• Family member with COVID: Anybody in the household has tested positive for COVID-19 by a source authorized by the State of Texas and is not recovered and 14 days have not yet passed.
• Quarantined: Individual is currently in 14-day quarantine due to close contact exposure to COVID-19.
• Child care: Child’s school or daycare closed and no alternatives are available.
The governor’s guidance will now require thousands of young, otherwise healthy workers to choose between their livelihood and their safety. Same goes for anyone under 65 with an autoimmune disorder or other underlying health condition. The guidance includes this broad caveat: “Any other situation will be subject to a case by case review by TWC based on individual circumstances.”
COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, does not spare the young. Just this week, an otherwise healthy 17-year-old died from the disease. On the same day, two men in their 30s also died. Today, a 20-year-old who had been “critically ill at an area hospital” died from COVID-19. When the initial shutdown happened, many businesses quickly shuttered so their employees could file for unemployment.
On Monday, Abbott announced that 1.9 million claims for unemployment had been filed and the state paid out more than $2 billion on those claims. His announcement caused concern from doctors, scientists, and public officials who believe the opening of the economy—even mandating these businesses host no more than 25 percent of their maximum occupancy—had come too soon. Testing is still woefully lacking. Dallas County has tested less than 1 percent of its total population and has still not seen two consecutive weeks of decline, a barometer that federal health officials recommend using to decide whether it’s time to reopen.
On Thursday, Texas Monthly interviewed one of the governor’s medical advisers, Dr. Mark McClellan, a native Texan and health policy expert at Duke University who helped craft the blueprint for reopening local economies. He told the magazine that critical benchmarks in both testing and contact tracing had not yet been reached. Even with Texas’ plan to add another nearly 3,000 contact tracers and institute a statewide help line, we will not meet the estimates required by the National Association of County and Health Officials. This NPR story breaks that national challenge down.
On Thursday, Dallas County reported 179 new cases of COVID-19. That’s the biggest single day increase since the pandemic started, beating Tuesday’s previous high of 135. Public health officials believe the jump is from loosened testing guidelines that allowed workers at essential retail and grocery and delivery businesses to get tests. Now restaurants are opening. And those workers will have to choose whether it’s worth the risk—because it doesn’t appear unemployment dollars will continue flowing their way.
