Stay closed or reopen? Opposing NC groups promote their positions on stay-at-home order
With two weeks remaining until Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order for North Carolina is set to expire, groups for and against the restrictions are mobilizing to push their agendas.
ReopenNC wants people to make their own stay-at-home decisions to avoid exposure to COVID-19 as the worldwide pandemic continues. The private Facebook page group, which started last Tuesday, surpassed 22,000 members on Monday.
“At the point it expires, he does not need to extend it,” said Ashley Smith, a Morganton mother of four who is one of ReopenNC’s founders. “He gets out of the way and lets people get back to their lives.”
On the other side, the public Stay Home NC group started a Facebook page on Monday that gained 500 members in its first five hours. The group’s members agree that restrictions must eventually be removed so that businesses can open. But they say they just want the economy to be reopened in a way to protect the public and prevent coronavirus from spreading further into the population.
Its founder, Michael Ryan Morgan of Mount Airy, posted on the page that he’s been fighting leukemia for three years and is currently hospitalized at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. He had a bone marrow transplant six months ago.
“This disease could completely destroy my lungs because my immune system is too young to fight it,” Morgan wrote. “Stay at home for me. Please.”
Cooper: The time ‘will come’
At a news conference Monday, Cooper said reversing the orders can only be done in a well-thought-out manner that protects people.
“We are all looking toward a time when we can loosen these restrictions, and it will come,” Cooper said. “We have a team examining how North Carolina can emerge with the right practices in place to keep us healthy and strong, and ready to jumpstart our economy.
“We are considering the most effective ways to modify executive orders to help boost the economy while continuing to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.”
In the meantime, he said, the restrictions in place are working.
“Epidemiologists have been running models on North Carolina’s caseload and our hospitals’ ability to care for those who are sick,” Cooper said. “These models show consistently that our executive orders work and that wholesale lifting of the orders would be a catastrophe.”
ReopenNC founder is against vaccines
One prevailing notion among public health experts is that a COVID-19 vaccine is needed before people can resume their pre-coronavirus activities.
But that proposed solution runs up against the beliefs of at least one of ReopenNC’s founders, who has previously posted on social media about her opposition to vaccinations for any diseases.
“I am against mandatory vaccination,” Smith said in an email on Monday. “That is a personal right and as a sovereign citizen I have the right to choose what medical procedures I and my children receive. Pandemic status/state of emergency doesn’t change that.”
Morgan said he formed Stay Home NC to fight what he called a “sad ideology” from ReopenNC.
“We fight for science and reason,” Morgan wrote. “We fight for the survival of the human race.”
ReopenNC has said they plan to hold weekly rallies on Tuesdays to encourage Cooper to end the restrictions by May 1. The group is planning to have members and supporters gather in a parking lot near the Legislative Building in downtown Raleigh on Tuesday at 11 a.m., where they’re instructed to honk their car horns for five seconds, at 15-minute intervals, over four hours.
‘It would be a catastrophe’
Smith said people “have the right to decide their own comfort level with any and all pathogens and viruses, just like we have done for every other illness that has come through our state and nation.”
Cooper said Monday that anyone wanting the restrictions to end abruptly is inviting danger.
“Some people want to completely obliterate these restrictions,” Cooper said Monday. “It would be a catastrophe. The numbers are very clear that the interventions that we’ve entered into — social gatherings, limitations on bars and restaurants, the stay at home order — those kinds of things are working.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 6:20 PM.