Mark Cuban criticizes Texas officials for 'haphazard' reopening, not being 'adamant' about masks

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Mark Cuban on how pausing re-opening plans may impact economy

Texas orders bars closed, reduces restaurant capacity as coronavirus cases hit all-time high; reaction from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban criticized officials in his home state of Texas on Wednesday, saying they weren't doing enough to guide residents and businesses through the coronavirus recovery.

His comments came in response to a question from "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin, who asserted that Texas had reopened too quickly.

"It wasn't so much that it was opened too quickly," Cuban said. "It was, one, that there were no protocols in place for businesses when they opened to keep their employees and their customers safe. It was just haphazard, businesses got to do what they thought was the right way to approach it. And, number two, nobody was adamant about masks or any other type of protocols for all of our citizens."

It's unclear which guidelines he was referring to but Texas claims that businesses have needed to follow minimum standard health protocols.

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Cuban also emphasized the need to "step up" enforcement of rules that residents wear masks when in public.

"We really have to step up our enforcement of masks. It doesn't matter if it's someone shopping in the mall. It doesn't matter if it's a protest. It doesn't matter if it's a church service," he said.

"Whatever it is, we need to step up, and I have one new thing for you, Sunny. There are different types of masks," he said. Cuban lamented that "no one" at the state or federal level was taking steps to "further increase the number of N95-type masks that are available.

Faced with surging coronavirus cases and hospitalizations that have made Texas one of the nation’s virus hot spots, Gov. Greg Abbott has halted elective surgeries in the state’s biggest counties and said he would “pause” its aggressive economic reopening statewide.

The suspension of elective surgeries is designed to protect hospital space in the Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio areas. Statewide, the number of COVID-19 patients has more than doubled in two weeks.

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The White House, Cuban said, asked companies to make additional masks but that initiative was somehow forgotten.

"The White House has already asked some companies to make more masks, but because hospitals weren't having as many problems with PPE [personal protective equipment], we just forgot about it. We need to take that to the next level and get those masks in the hands of citizens because — and then on top of that, train them on how to put them on and how long to wear them, which means we're going to have to get everybody more than one."

Vice President Mike Pence defended the administration's response last month, saying that it vastly expanded its production of PPE.

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"We’ve also vastly expanded our supplies of crucial medical equipment. In March, there were genuine fears that hospitals in our hot spots would run out of personal protective equipment like N95 masks, gloves or, even worse, ventilators for patients battling respiratory failure. The Strategic National Stockpile hadn’t been refilled since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, and it had only 10,000 ventilators on hand," Pence said.

"Since then, we’ve increased the supply of personal protective equipment by the billions. Our administration launched Project Air Bridge—a partnership between the federal government and private companies—that, as of June 12, had conducted more than 200 flights from overseas to deliver more than 143 million N95 masks, 598 million surgical and procedural masks, 20 million eye and face shields, 265 million gowns and coveralls, and 14 billion gloves."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.