A careful but risky reopening for North Carolina
N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper announced Tuesday that North Carolina will move forward with the first phase of reopening the state’s economy. It’s a welcome first step toward slowing COVID-19’s economic devastation by putting more people back to work, but it’s a move that brings some risk and disregards the governor’s own benchmarks for reopenings.
The changes, which take effect Friday, are incremental — certainly not the “open for business” signs that some states have hung on their doors. North Carolina will allow more non-essential businesses to open, thousands of which had already been given permission to operate by Cooper’s Department of Revenue. The changes also eliminate some incongruity in the governor’s original stay-at-home order — people complained that they could buy a lawn ornament at a hardware superstore but not shop at non-essential retail outlets, for example.
The Phase 1 reopening fits with criteria laid out earlier this week by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen, who said that health officials want people to avoid activities that involve contact with others for more than 10 minutes at a time. She also noted that indoor activity carries a higher risk than outdoors, as do public activities that involve sitting for more than 10 minutes. That’s why restaurant dining rooms, hair salons, movie theaters and other businesses will remain restricted until at least Phase 2, which could come in two to three weeks if North Carolina makes enough progress on COVID-19 benchmarks.
Or perhaps even if not. Cooper’s is giving Phase 1 the nod despite the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths steadily increasing nationwide, and despite some of North Carolina’s current COVID-19 numbers lagging behind what federal and state guidelines recommend for reopening.
White House guidelines, for example, call for downward trajectory over a 14-day period of reported influenza-like illnesses and COVID-19 symptoms before states start reopening. Cooper’s own reopening checklist calls for a downward trajectory in new cases, a “continued” downward trajectory in COVID-like illnesses and a 14-day downward trajectory in the number of people currently hospitalized. Outside of a promising short-term trend on COVID-like illnesses, North Carolina hasn’t achieved those benchmarks as of Tuesday.
The numbers aren’t all bad. North Carolina is meeting the metric of a decline in percentages of positive COVID-19 tests, although that might be a factor of people with less-severe symptoms now having more access to tests. Add it all up and the reality is this: Things are not yet getting better in North Carolina. They’re merely beginning not to get worse.
That’s enough for Cooper to push ahead with what he called a “careful and deliberate next step.” It’s an economic decision, certainly, and it also may be an understandable political calculation. The governor is facing growing pressure to loosen stay-at-home restrictions, and North Carolina is among the last to begin reopening.
But political decisions also bring political risk. Cooper, like other Democratic and Republican governors, held a high ground of sorts by taking action to slow the spread of COVID-19 despite opposition and a president who downplayed the crisis and irresponsibly urged reopening. Now, Cooper and others are moving toward reopening without the full support of data.
We hope that doesn’t result in a coronavirus regression in North Carolina, and we urge the governor to continue to be aggressive in fighting COVID-19, specifically with increased testing and tracing. (Massachusetts, with a smaller population than North Carolina, announced the hiring last month of 1,000 new COVID-19 contact tracers. North Carolina wants to increase from 250 tracers to 500.)
We also hope Cooper is more attentive to his COVID-19 benchmarks before taking the more significant step of Phase 2 reopening. The governor has said regularly that science would drive the decisions he makes with the coronavirus. North Carolina’s health may depend on it.
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 5:32 PM with the headline "A careful but risky reopening for North Carolina."