COVID-19 News and Cooper’s Plan: Some Context and Criticism | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Brenee Goforth.

    With all the differing information swirling around COVID-19, it is always helpful to put that information in context. Our Jon Sanders did just that in his research brief this week. Sanders writes:

• I don't think people have any idea how very few people in North Carolina on any particular day pose a risk to them, however small, of passing along the virus. The only people who can do it are the ones with active cases. As of Monday, Sept. 14, there were 15,464 active cases, and it was down from 18,288 last week.
• The population of the entire state of North Carolina is over 10.63 million.
• What, you heard there were 185,781 cases in North Carolina? Except for government and media tallies, those aren't cases in perpetuity. Most of those cases have recovered — 167,257 presumed recoveries, in fact.

    Members of the John Locke Foundation staff have criticized the unscientific and seemingly discriminatory way the Governor has enforced social distancing in North Carolina. No case serves as a more egregious example than Gov. Cooper and DHHS Sec. Mandy Cohen's guidance for the UNC Kenan Memorial Stadium. Sanders explains:

• Last week Gov. Cooper and state health Sec. Mandy Cohen, an unelected bureaucrat with no accountability to voters, decided to deprive the parents of college football players of the ability to attend their games last weekend. UNC-Chapel Hill, playing host to Syracuse, was forbidden from having more than 25 people at Kenan Memorial Stadium, a stadium with a capacity of 50,500.
• To stress the obvious: it's an outdoor stadium. There's no science to this petty, mean order — just the whim of an unchecked autocrat.
• So the governor would allow only one person for every ___ seats? The answer is 2020. Yep.

    Requiring thousands of seats between spectators is undoubtedly overkill for social distancing and not grounded in science. But, then again, the opening of restaurants but not bars, pre-school classes but not kindergarten classes, and allowing more than 25 people in a Walmart but not a 50,500 person stadium is what many have exhaustedly come to accept from this administration.

    Read Sander's full brief HERE. Read Becki Gray's concerns about Cooper's plan in Carolina Journal HERE.