As North Carolina moves into Phase 2 of reopening the economy, Governor Cooper should ask for a do-over. He should meet with advisors and take another shot. His list of what can open and what cannot is too ambiguous, lacks reason, and ignores more recent information about the virus. It also seems to ignore the only way we return to a level normalcy—protect the vulnerable by tracking and tracing the virus and isolating infected people, not healthy ones.
I live in a restaurant and bar town. When I meet people for drinks, I often go to Acme or B-Side or Orange County Social Club. On Friday, I can still go to Acme. It’s a restaurant with a bar that makes 50% or more of its revenue from food. I might be able to go to B-Side. It’s a bar attached to a restaurant that allows people to order from the menu. But I definitely won’t be able to go to OCSC because it’s just a bar and Cooper’s order demands bars stay closed. That’s not right and it’s not good for our community. It will just send people to the bars that are also restaurants.
As for gyms, movie theaters, bowling alleys, playgrounds and museums, the governor should allow them to open with restrictions, directives and warnings. Capacity should be limited in all of these venues and precautions such as requiring space between seats or machines would reduce contact. Masks should be required and frequent sanitizing should be mandatory. People should be warned that frequenting those places increases the risk of infection. At some point, we need people to take personal responsibility for their actions.
Unfortunately, we’re not ready for crowded entertainment venues such as live music shows and sporting events. While smaller businesses can regulate space, larger venues cannot. They need to wait for more time.
The information we have about the disease is also changing rapidly. Scientists have better data and more information about how it spreads. We were initially told that it could easily be transmitted through surfaces like door knobs and counter-tops. Now, the CDC says that’s not true. Person-to-person spread is the primary way that the virus is transmitted and it “does not spread easily in other ways.” We should not worry about our children contracting the disease from playground equipment.
We cannot stay shutdown until the virus is completely under control. That won’t happen until we have a widely produced vaccine or reliable treatment and we’re not likely to have either in the near future. The goal should be to protect the vulnerable. While there are exceptions, the virus is most deadly to people with underlying conditions, including age. We can more easily identify and protect those likely to be harmed from the virus than we can keep it out of the general population for years.
The failure of the federal government to put in place a testing and tracing program will go down as one of the great public health failures in modern times. Before the virus was widely spread, we might have been able to isolate it and contain it. That didn’t happen. We cannot put that genie back into the bottle. Now, we need to learn how to live with it. Waiting another six weeks won’t reduce infection rates substantially if people aren’t altering their behavior, but it will likely put a lot of small businesses out of business.
If we are opening up nail and hair salons, restaurants, and swimming pools, it’s hard to see how most other businesses increase the spread more than those. If we don’t have the testing we need to identify and isolate contagious people, then we need to learn how to alter our behavior to reduce the spread of the virus. The goal should be to protect the people most vulnerable. I’m not callous. I have parents who are both in their mid-80s. I have a brother with a severely compromised immune system and damaged vital organs.
Finally, if we had a more progressive government that would sustain the shutdown with payments to businesses and people, maybe staying closed for another six weeks would make more sense. We don’t. Republicans aren’t going to raise the revenue necessary to support small businesses or people. Instead, they are already calling for cuts to vital services in the middle of a pandemic. It will take at least one election cycle and probably several to have the type of government that puts people ahead of corporate America. The pandemic has exposed the weakness of our social safety net, but we aren’t going to fix it between now and June 26.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Unfortunately Cooper has to thread a very fine needle, that’s as much art as science at this point. There are going to be people at both ends of the spectrum that will be unhappy with whatever he does, so the task at hand is to keep those cohorts as small as possible. And while the ones who would have us live in a bubble for the duration are ignoring the obvious problems with that strategy, they will at least emerge with an abundance of caution, and a genuine interest in protecting the well being of themselves and those around them. The majority seem to fall somewhere on a scale between those and the edge case sat the other pole, who have gone as far as to make credible threats of violence against those who suggest they should inconvenience themselves by wearing a mask in public. And it’s this group that will truly send things sideways and screw it up for everybody. Because if you could trust people to behave in ways that ensure the safety of all, re-opening would be far less of a risk. But this group is the one that will paint any inconvenience they’re asked to endure for the public good as tyranny. Wear a mask in public? My rights are being trampled! Keep six feet distance between you and the next person? Totalitarianism! And those who do play by the rules and show any concern for their fellows? Sheeple!
And while they may currently be few in number we have seen this movie before. And like most sequels, it sucks. They have the backing of the same dark money groups that brought us the Tea Party, which you’ll recall, was a small fringe movement when it started as well.
I’m all in favor of letting natural selection do its job. You have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to be stupid. What you do NOT have is a Constitutionally guaranteed right to put other people at risk with that stupidity. And therein we find the eye of that needle. Because it’s obvious to anyone who saw the first movie that the #BecuzMurrica crowd is being played. It has been that way for millenia. Someone figured out right about the time we started banding together in tribes that it was always possible to get half the people to act against their own interest if you could convince them that they were actually acting against the interest of the other half. Global wars have been fought on that principle. It has been weaponized by every government, every movement, every revolution (real or metaphorical) in every age of human history. And for all of our advances, and all of our accumulated knowledge, we don’t seem to have gotten any smarter in that one area. If we survive as a species long enough to figure that out, we might actually achieve our potential. But that itself begs a question, can we survive that long without figuring that out FIRST? This may be the way we find the answer to that question. And if we fail to do that, then we continue to live in the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large, and the only one who profit by it will be those running the experiment.
You make good points. Since person-to-person is the primary method of transmission and masks stop most of that, I do not understand why masks for customers as well as employees are not required by the Governor. They are a real inconvenience but if we want to open businesses, wearing a mask is minor compared to infecting others, and potentially their families and health care workers, while pre-symptomatic. Not to mention creating another wave so we are back to square 1.
The virus is spread by shedding particles that are picked up by other people. If there is a person shedding a lot of particles because they are quite sick, it takes exposure to that person for a shorter time to get the virus. If there is a person who has the virus but does not show symptoms, it would take an exposure of at least 5 minutes to spread the virus. The formula for transmission is the amount of virus particles being shed times the length of time you are in range. Going to a restaurant can be made a little safer by spacing the seating. Where you sit in the restaurant in relation to anyone there who is shedding virus particles determines your chance of getting it. If the air conditioning is blowing over someone who is shedding particles and then blowing on you, you are more likely to get the virus. Going to a bar doesn’t generally allow for spacing–the point being to sit with friends and have conversation over drinks for more than five minutes. Cooper’s guidelines make sense to me, except that I would wait longer before opening up at all and see what happens in the places that are opening up. Eventually we will have to find a way to live with restrictions for the next year or so until a vaccine is widely available.