Local leaders to announce stay-at-home orders in Austin and San Antonio

Two of Texas’ biggest cities — Austin and San Antonio — and their surrounding counties are poised to join Dallas in ordering their residents to stay at home to suppress the spread of the new coronavirus.

San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg will announce details Monday evening of a “Stay Home, Work Safe” order in Bexar County and San Antonio, the city of San Antonio Office of Emergency Management announced. And the Austin City Council and Travis County will team up Tuesday to issue a stay-at-home order, Austin Mayor Steve Adler told The Texas Tribune on Monday.

The restrictions, the details of which have not been disclosed, “will contain the best of the various such orders around the [country] to create our own ‘stay home work safe’ order,” Adler said of the Austin order.

The orders will likely represent some of the most stringent measures local officials have taken so far to address the colossal public health crisis. Gov. Greg Abbott has resisted issuing a statewide order but said he supported local jurisdictions issuing such orders if the circumstances warrant them.

On Sunday evening, Dallas County became the first to order residents to shelter in place, telling all residents to stay at home if they were not doing certain essential activities. The city of Waco issued a similar directive Monday.

It appears as though several other of the state’s largest counties, including Harris, are looking into similar restrictions. According to the Houston Chronicle, Harris County officials began drafting a shelter-in-place order over the weekend.

The new rules soon to be implemented in Austin and San Antonio — and those already in place in Dallas and Waco — are not an anomaly globally, either. Californians are operating under a similar crackdown, as is Italy, which is under lockdown as the death toll Thursday surpassed that of China, where the virus originated.

In a phone interview Monday morning, Adler said many of the major cities had been in contact with one another, with each municipality weighing things like the stress on the economy, health care sector and public in determining whether to issue local mandates.

“Our decisions are being motivated by the analysis being done here and the modeling being done here, but each city and county assess for themselves, while also recognizing there’s benefit in having action that’s unified that covers a lot of the state,” he said.

Still, some counties are taking a more measured approach. A spokeswoman for the city of El Paso said the city is not going beyond the governor’s order at this time, which limits social gatherings to 10 people, prohibits eating and drinking at restaurants and bars, closes gyms, and bans people from visiting nursing homes except for critical care, among other things, through midnight April 3. Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley also said Tarrant County isn’t planning a countywide shelter-in-place order as of now.

Disclosure: Steve Adler, a former Texas Tribune board chairman, has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.