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Covid-19 Live Updates: Texas Lifts Restrictions, Part of a Wave of U.S. Reopenings
The state announced plans to end a mask mandate and allow businesses to operate with no capacity limits. In Brazil, a more
contagious variant has torn through one city and is spreading to others.

Hereʼs what you need to know:

Texas is ending its mask mandate and will allow all businesses to fully reopen.

Brazilʼs coronavirus crisis is a warning to the world, scientists say.

Dolly Parton, who helped fund the Moderna vaccine, gets a ʻdose of her own medicine.ʼ

German leaders consider a lockdown extension, and other news around the world.

ʻItʼs like buying Bruce Springsteen ticketsʼ: Extra doses send vaccine seekers scrambling.

Romaniaʼs underfunded health system creaks under the pressure of the pandemic.

Corporations wrestle with the question of when to return to offices.

Texas is ending its mask mandate and will allow all businesses to fully reopen.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Tuesday that he was ending his statewide mask mandate, effective March 10, and that all
businesses in the state could then operate with no capacity limits.

“I just announced Texas is OPEN 100%” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “EVERYTHING.”

Mr. Abbott took the action after federal health officials warned governors not to ease restrictions yet because progress across the
country in reducing coronavirus cases appears to have stalled in the last week.

“To be clear, Covid has not, like, suddenly disappeared,” Mr. Abbott said. “Covid still exists in Texas and the United States and across
the globe.”

Even so, he said, “state mandates are no longer needed” because advanced treatments are now available for people with Covid-19, the
state is able to test large numbers of people for the virus each day and 5.7 million vaccine shots have already been given to Texans.

Speaking to reporters at a Chamber of Commerce event in Lubbock on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, said that most of
the mandates issued during the peak of the pandemic in the state would be lifted; he did not specify which mandates would remain.
He said top elected officials in each county could still impose certain restrictions locally if hospitals in their region became
dangerously full, but could not jail anyone for violating them.

“People and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate,” he said.

Target and Macy’s said on Tuesday that they would continue requiring customers and employees to wear masks, Reuters reported.
General Motors and Toyota said their employees in the state would also still be required to wear masks.

Democratic leaders in the state reacted swiftly and harshly to the announcement. “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily
dangerous,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the state party chairman, said in a statement, adding, “This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-
disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott
doesn’t care.”

In states like Florida and South Dakota, schools and businesses have been widely open for months, and many local and state officials
across the country have been easing restrictions since last summer. Still, the pace of reopenings has quickened considerably in the
past few days.

In Chicago, tens of thousands of children returned to public school this week, while snow-covered parks and playgrounds around the
city that have been shuttered since last March were opened. Restaurants in Massachusetts were allowed to operate without capacity
limits, and South Carolina erased its limits on large gatherings.

The Biden administration has warned states not to relax restrictions too soon, despite the recent decline in cases. “We stand to
completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” the director of the C.D.C., Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at a White House
virus briefing on Monday.

The nation as a whole has been averaging more than 67,000 new cases a day lately, more than at any time during the spring and
summer waves of cases, according to a New York Times database.
Texas was among the first states to ease restrictions after the first wave, a move that epidemiologists believe was premature and led
to the summer surge across the Sunbelt.

Though conditions in the state and the nation have improved from a huge surge over the holidays, the coronavirus is still spreading
rapidly in Texas. The state has been averaging about 7,600 new cases a day recently, rebounding from a drop in February when a
severe storm disrupted testing. Texas is among the top 10 states in recent spread, averaging 27 cases for every 100,000 people.

And Texans are still dying of Covid-19 in significant numbers: The state reported an average of 227 Covid-19 deaths a day over the past
week, more than any other state except California.

Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston and the top elected official in Harris County, Lina Hidalgo, both Democrats, wrote to Mr. Abbott on
Tuesday before his announcement, asking the governor not to end the mask mandate and calling such a move “premature and
harmful.”

“We must continue the proven public health interventions most responsible for our positive case trends, and not allow overconfidence
to endanger our own successes,” they wrote.

Mr. Abbott made his reopening announcement in a Mexican restaurant, on the anniversary of Texas’ declaration of independence from
Mexico in 1836.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this item misspelled Lina Hidalgo’s given name.

— Eileen Sullivan, Dave Montgomery and Bryan Pietsch

Tracking the Coronavirus ›

United States › On March 2 14-day change

New cases 57,789 –19%

New deaths 1,306* –9%
*Ohio removed deaths

Risk in your area ›

Search for a county

Find specific information about the county where you live.

U.S. vaccinations ›

Fully vaccinated 7.9%

At least one dose 16%

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State restrictions Vaccine development

Brazilʼs coronavirus crisis is a warning to the world, scientists say.

Covid-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. And now, the country is battling a more
contagious variant, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe.

On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 Covid-19 deaths, its highest single-day toll of the pandemic.

Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus appears able to infect some people who have
already recovered from other versions of the virus. And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in small numbers in the
United States and other countries.

Although trials of a number of vaccines indicate that they can protect against severe illness even when they do not prevent infection
with the variant, most of the world has not been inoculated. That means even people who had recovered and thought they were safe
for now might still be at risk, and that world leaders might, once again, be lifting restrictions too soon.

“You need vaccines to get in the way of these things,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, speaking of variants that might cause reinfections.

Brazilians hoped that they had seen the worst of the outbreak last year. Manaus, capital of the northern state of Amazonas, was hit so
hard in April and May that scientists believed the city may have reached herd immunity.
But then in September, cases in the state began rising again. By January, scientists had discovered that a new variant, which became
known as P.1, had become dominant in the state. Within weeks, its danger became clear as hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen amid
a crush of patients, leading scores to suffocate to death.

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have said that Covid-19 reinfections appear to be extremely rare, which has allowed people
who recover to presume they have immunity, at least for a while. But that was before P.1 appeared.

One way to tamp down the surge would be through vaccinations, but the rollout in Brazil has been slow.

Brazil began vaccinating health care professionals and older adults in late January. But the government has failed to secure a large
enough number of doses. Wealthier countries have snapped up most of the supply, while President Jair Bolsonaro has been skeptical
both of the disease’s impact and of vaccines.

Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist at Fiocruz, a prominent scientific research center, said that Brazil’s failure to mount a robust
inoculation campaign had set the stage for the current crisis.

“We should be vaccinating more than a million people per day,” she said. “We aren’t, not because we don’t know how to do it, but
because we don’t have enough vaccines.”

Other countries should take heed, said Ester Sabino, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of São Paulo who is among the
leading experts on the P.1 variant.

“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new
variant appears,” she said. “It will get there one day.”

— Manuela Andreoni, Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado

Dolly Parton, who helped fund the Moderna vaccine, gets a ʻdose of her own medicine.ʼ
The country music star Dolly Parton has another new gig: Singing the praises of coronavirus shots and getting vaccinated on camera.

Last year, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drug maker Moderna to
develop one of the first coronavirus vaccines to be authorized in the United States. The federal government eventually invested $1
billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but the leader of the research effort, Dr. Mark Denison, said that the singer’s donation
had funded its critical early stages.

On Tuesday, Ms. Parton, 75, received a Moderna shot at Vanderbilt Health in Tennessee. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she
wrote on Twitter.

“Well, hey, it’s me,” she says to her fans in an accompanying video, a minute before a doctor arrives to inoculate her. “I’m finally gonna
get my vaccine.”

“I’m so excited,” she added in the video, which racked up more than a million views within about four hours. “I’ve been waiting a
while. I’m old enough to get it, and I’m smart enough to get it.”

She also broke into song (naturally), replacing the word “Jolene” in one of her best-known choruses with “vaccine.”

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,” she sang, embellishing the last one with her trademark Tennessee lilt. “I’m begging of you please
don’t hesitate.”

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,” she added, “because once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late.”

Just before the doctor arrived to inoculate her — or “pop me in my arm,” as she put it — she doubled down on her message.

“I know I’m trying to be funny now, but I’m dead serious about the vaccine,” she said. “I think we all want to get back to normal —
whatever that is — and that would be a great shot in the arm, wouldn’t it?”

“I just want to say to all of you cowards out there: Don’t be such a chicken squat,” she added. “Get out there and get your shot.”

— Mike Ives

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

German leaders consider a lockdown extension, and other news around the world.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and governors of the country’s states were to meet on Tuesday to talk about what an extension
to the nation’s 11-week lockdown could look like. Some governors and federal lawmakers have been calling for an easing of measures.
The current restrictions are set to expire next week.

But medical experts have warned that Germany is at the beginning of a third wave of the pandemic, driven in part by more infectious
variants, and that continued restrictions are likely.
Christian Drosten, the chief virologist at the Charité hospital in Berlin and a government adviser, said during a podcast on Tuesday,
“We are walking into a situation with our eyes closed.”

While some schools in Germany have reopened, most students are not on full schedules. Nonessential businesses are closed
nationwide and restaurants have been shuttered since November, when the government first began a “lockdown light,” which proved
ineffective in halting growing cases. Restrictions were tightened in December.

Despite the measures, there has been a slight increase in new infections. On Tuesday, the German health authorities registered about
9,000 new cases, about 1,000 more than the same day the week before. A New York Times database puts the seven-day average at
8,172; two weeks ago, it was 6,121.

After meeting with governors on Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Merkel is expected to announce an extension of the lockdown until at least
March 28, though businesses like bookstores and flower stores are expected to join hairdressers in being able to open under strict
distancing guidelines.

In other news from around the world:

In the Netherlands, a pipe bomb exploded at a coronavirus testing center on Wednesday, causing damage but no injuries, the public
broadcaster NOS reported. The blast at the center in the town of Bovenkarspel was caused by a “metal pipe that exploded,” Erwin
Sintenie, a police spokesman, said. The lone security guard present when the device was detonated was unhurt, though windows
were broken, the police said. There have been multiple, and at times violent, protests in the Netherlands against coronavirus
restrictions. In January, a testing center in the town of Urk was set alight after the government imposed a curfew.

North Korea is expected to receive about 1.7 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca shots by the end of May, according to a report
released on Tuesday by Covax, an international body established to promote global access to coronavirus vaccines. The
AstraZeneca doses are among about 237 million that Covax says it expects to distribute worldwide over the same period. The
North’s state news media has long insisted that the country has no confirmed Covid-19 cases, but outside experts are skeptical.

Pelé, the Brazilian former soccer star, said in an Instagram post that he had received a coronavirus vaccine. He noted that the
pandemic was “not over yet,” and urged his nearly six million followers to continue wearing masks and taking other safety
precautions. “This will pass if we can think of others and help each other,” he wrote. Brazil has reported more than 10.5 million cases
and 257,000 deaths, some of the highest tallies in the world.

Bharat Biotech, an Indian pharmaceutical company, said on Wednesday that its vaccine, Covaxin, had shown 81 percent efficacy in
interim trials. The announcement came two months after Indian regulators approved the shots for emergency use despite a lack of
published data showing that they were safe and effective.

— Christopher F. Schuetze, Mike Ives and Thomas Erdbrink

ʻItʼs like buying Bruce Springsteen ticketsʼ: Extra doses send vaccine seekers scrambling.
After weeks of waiting, Judy Franke’s vaccine breakthrough came when her phone rang at 8 p.m. one freezing February night. There
were rumors of extra doses at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Ms. Franke, 73, had an hour to get there. No guarantees.

“I called my daughter and she said, ʻI’m putting my boots on right now,’” said Ms. Franke, a retired teacher with a weakened immune
system.
Judy Franke of Roseville, Minn., was able to get vaccinated by finding an extra
dose through the online community.
Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

The clamor for hard-to-get vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of
an extra, expiring dose and drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment.

Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: Vaccine lurkers.

Even with inoculation rates accelerating and new vaccines entering the market, finding a shot remains out of reach for many, nearly
three months into the country’s vaccination campaign. Websites crash. Appointments are scarce.

The leftover shots exist because the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have a limited life span once they are thawed and mixed. When no-
shows or miscalculations leave pharmacies and clinics with extras, they have mere hours to use the vaccines or risk having to throw
them away.
And so, tens of thousands of people have banded together on social-media groups. They trade tips about which Walmarts have extra
doses. They report on whether besieged pharmacies are even answering the phone. They speculate about whether a looming blizzard
might keep enough people home to free up a slot.

“It’s like buying Bruce Springsteen tickets,” said Maura Caldwell, who started a Facebook page called Minneapolis Vaccine Hunters to
help people navigate the search for appointments. The group has about 20,000 members.

Health experts said the scavenger hunt for leftovers highlighted the persistent disparities in the U.S. vaccination rollout, where access
to lifesaving medicine can hinge on computer savvy, personal connections and the ability to drop everything to snag an expiring dose.

In Minnesota, when Ms. Franke arrived at the convention center, there were about 20 other people already milling around in the lobby,
she said, and a health worker quickly emerged to inform them that there were no leftovers.

But many in the crowd stuck around, and after a half-hour, the vaccination team allowed people 65 and older, teachers and emergency
responders to get their shots. Ms. Franke lined up and said she cried with relief on the car ride home to the suburbs.

— Jack Healy

Romaniaʼs underfunded health system creaks under the pressure of the pandemic.
As vaccination programs continue to be rolled out around the world, many countries are now turning their attention to the pent-up
demand for non-Covid-19 health care, which fell by the wayside during months of crisis response.

In Romania, there is a deep concern about an overwhelmed health care system as many people suffering from other health issues
have been without care, or missing regular medical appointments, over the past year. That includes cancer patients and those with
HIV.

Victor Cauni, interim manager of one of the largest hospitals in the capital, Bucharest, said that the urology ward had gone from
performing 400 to 500 medical interventions a month in recent years to barely 50 in total in the past year.

“Whether we like it or not, we have more patients with many other illnesses compared to Covid patients,” he said in an interview with
The Associated Press last week. “We need to open for them at least partially. We’re discriminating against patients with serious
conditions.”

Health care scandals in Romania in recent years have also left many people cautious about seeking treatment at hospitals, an issue
exacerbated by the pandemic. Since November, fires in two hospitals treating coronavirus patients have left more than 20 people
dead.

Romania’s spending on its health care system is among the lowest in the European Union, with just 5.2 percent of its G.D.P. allocated
toward it. The average in the bloc is around 10 percent.

The Romanian Health Ministry organized a call last month with hospital administrators about the need to evaluate infrastructure and
potentially create separate channels for coronavirus patients so that other patients could receive treatment. The ministry is also
assessing the ability to use some hospitals solely for the treatment of patients with severe cases of the virus, and return others to
handling only patients being treated for other conditions.

“I think it’s only in the second half of this year that we’re going to really understand what happened last year in terms of access to
health care,” said Vlad Voiculescu, the Romanian health minister.

Mr. Voiculescu noted that access to treatment had been limited for some patients, especially those in rural and smaller urban areas
where hospitals of 300 or 400 beds had been transformed into coronavirus support hospitals.

“This cannot go on,” he said, adding that some hospitals were already set to return to more general usage.

Romania has largely kept the spread of the coronavirus in check, putting in place tight restrictions early on that limited the number of
infections. Still, there have been more than 800,000 confirmed cases and more than 20,500 deaths in the country, which has a
population of around 19 million.

Like the rest of the world, Romania is bracing for another potential wave in cases, with concerning variants of the virus on the rise.

“We have the vaccination campaign,” Mr. Voiculescu said, adding, “We do have the mechanisms in place for more precautionary
measures if there’s going to be another wave.”

— Kit Gillet

Corporations wrestle with the question of when to return to offices.

Corporate executives around the United States are wrestling with how to reopen offices as the pandemic starts to loosen its grip.
Businesses — and many employees — are eager to return to some kind of normal work life: going back to the office, grabbing lunch at
their favorite restaurant or stopping for drinks after work.
While coronavirus cases are declining and vaccinations are rising, many companies have not committed to a time and strategy for
bringing employees back. The most important variable, many executives said, is how long it will take for most workers to be
vaccinated.

Another major consideration revolves around the children of employees. Companies say they can’t make firm decisions until they
know when local schools will reopen for in-person learning.

Then there is a larger question: Does it make sense to go back to the way things were before the pandemic, given that people have
become accustomed to the rhythms of remote work?

More than 55 percent of people surveyed by the consulting firm PwC late last year said that they would prefer to work remotely at
least three days a week after the pandemic recedes. But their bosses appear to have somewhat different preferences — 68 percent of
employers said that they believed employees needed to be in the office at least three days a week to maintain corporate culture.

Some companies that have begun trying to get workers back to the office — like Vivint, a home-security business based in Provo,
Utah, that has more than 10,000 employees across the United States — say they are doing so on a voluntary basis.

Vivint is allowing 40 percent of its 4,000 employees in Utah to return, though only about 20 percent have chosen to do so regularly.

To accommodate social distancing, Vivint has restricted access to each building to a single entrance, where employees have their
temperature taken. Signs remind employees to wear masks at all times, and the company has limited capacity in conference rooms.

Vivint also has an on-site clinic that has been offering 15-minute rapid virus tests to employees and their families.

The company hopes to use the clinic to distribute coronavirus vaccines to its workers when Utah allows it to do so.

— Julie Creswell, Gillian Friedman and Peter Eavis

The pandemic disrupts Australiaʼs agriculture industry, exposing its shaky labor foundation.
The pandemic has exposed the unstable foundation of Australia’s agriculture industry, a $54 billion-a-year goliath that has long been
underpinned by the work of young, transient foreigners.

Border closures and other measures to keep the coronavirus out of the country have left Australia with a deficit of 26,000
farmworkers, according to the nation’s top agriculture association. As a result, tens of millions of dollars in crops have gone to waste
from coast to coast.

“We’ve never faced a worker shortage like this in my 40 years,” said Peter Hall, who owns an orchard in southeastern Australia. “I
suspect for each lot of crop, we’ll just not get there in time.”

This enormous crop destruction has fueled rising calls for Australia to rethink how it secures farm labor, with many pushing for an
immigration overhaul that would give agricultural workers a pathway to permanent residency.

Since 2005, the government has steered young travelers to farms by offering extensions of working holiday visas from one year to two
for those who have completed three months of work in agriculture. Backpackers can earn extensions by working in other industries
like construction or mining, but 90 percent do so through farm work.

In a normal year, more than 200,000 backpackers would come to Australia, making up 80 percent of the country’s harvest work force,
according to industry groups.

Now, there are just 45,000 in the country, according to government data, and attempts to fill the labor shortage with unemployed
Australians have been largely unsuccessful.

The federal government has flown in workers from nearby Pacific islands, which have largely avoided the pandemic. But with border
restrictions in place, the arrangements have sometimes been convoluted.

Nationwide, only about 2,400 workers have been flown into the country since the borders were shut, according to the National
Farmers’ Federation.

— Yan Zhuang

When Johnson & Johnson fell behind on its vaccines, the Biden administration stepped in to broker a
deal.
President Biden said on Tuesday that the United States was “on track” to have enough supply of coronavirus vaccines “for every adult
in America by the end of May,” accelerating his effort to deliver the nation from the worst public health crisis in a century.

In a brief speech at the White House, Mr. Biden said his administration had provided support to Johnson & Johnson that would enable
the company and its partners to make vaccines around the clock. The administration had also brokered a deal in which the
pharmaceutical giant Merck would help manufacture the new Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.
Merck is the world’s second-largest vaccine manufacturer, though its own attempt at a coronavirus vaccine was unsuccessful. Officials
described the partnership between the two competitors as historic and said it harked back to Mr. Biden’s vision of a wartime effort to
fight the coronavirus, similar to the manufacturing campaigns when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.

Originally, Johnson & Johnson’s $1 billion contract, negotiated last year when Donald J. Trump was president, called for the company
to deliver enough doses for 87 million Americans by the end of May. Added to pledges from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech to deliver
enough doses to cover a total of 200 million Americans by that date, the contract would have given the country enough vaccine for all
adults 18 and older.

But Johnson & Johnson and its partners fell behind in their manufacturing. Although the company was supposed to deliver its first 37
million doses by the end of March, it said that it would be able to deliver only 20 million doses by that date, which made Biden aides
nervous.

In late January, Jeffrey D. Zients, Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, and Dr. David Kessler, who is managing vaccine
distribution for the White House, reached out to top officials at the company, including Alex Gorsky, its chief executive, with a blunt
message: This is unacceptable.

That led to a series of negotiations in February in which administration officials repeatedly pressured Johnson & Johnson to accept
that they needed help, while urging Merck to be part of the solution, according to two administration officials who participated in the
discussions.

In a statement on Tuesday, Merck said that the federal government would pay it up to $269 million to adapt and make available its
existing facilities to produce coronavirus vaccines.

One federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said other steps that the administration took would move up Johnson &
Johnson’s manufacturing timeline.

Those steps, said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, included providing a team of experts to monitor manufacturing and
logistical support from the Defense Department. In addition, the president will invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era
law, to give Johnson & Johnson access to supplies necessary to make and package vaccines.

“This is a type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II,” Mr. Biden said at the White House. He thanked Merck
and Johnson & Johnson for “stepping up and being good corporate citizens during this crisis.”

Noah Weiland contributed reporting.

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas and Michael D. Shear

Empty office buildings squeeze city budgets as property values fall.

Dormant offices, malls and restaurants have turned cities around the country into ghost towns. They foreshadow a fiscal time bomb
for municipal budgets, which are heavily reliant on property taxes and are facing real-estate revenue losses of as much as 10 percent
in 2021, according to government finance officials.

While many states had stronger-than-expected revenue in 2020, a sharp decline in the value of commercial properties is expected to
take a big bite out of city budgets when those empty buildings are assessed in the coming months. For states, property taxes account
for just about 1 percent of tax revenue, but they can make up 30 percent or more of the taxes that cities and towns take in and use to
fund local schools, police forces and other public services.

The coming fiscal strain has local officials from both parties pleading with the Biden administration and members of Congress to
quickly approve relief for local governments.

Lawmakers in Washington are negotiating over a stimulus package that could provide as much as $350 billion to states and cities. The
aid would come after a year of clashes between Democrats and Republicans over whether assistance for local governments is
warranted or if it’s simply a bailout for poorly managed states.

On Saturday, the House passed a $1.9 trillion bill that would provide aid to cities and states and garnered no Republican support. The
Senate is expected to take up the bill this week with a vote that is likely to break down along similar party lines. Republicans have
continued to object to significant aid for states, saying most are in decent financial shape and cherry-picking data to support their
argument, such as revised budget estimates that show improvement because of previous rounds of federal stimulus, including
generous unemployment benefits.

For local officials from both parties, however, the help cannot come soon enough and they have been making their concerns known to
Treasury officials and members of Congress.

The pandemic has upended America’s commercial property sector. In cities across the country, skyscrapers are dark, shopping
centers are shuttered and restaurants have been relegated to takeout service. Social-distancing measures have redefined workplaces
and accelerated the trend of telecommuting.
American cities are facing red ink for a broad swath of reasons but the pain is unevenly distributed. In some cases, a rise in residential
real-estate values will make up for the commercial property downturn, and some segments, such as warehouses, have been doing well
as online shopping lifts demand for distribution centers. States that do not have income taxes, such as Florida and Texas, are more
vulnerable to fluctuations in real-estate values.

— Alan Rappeport