by Bob Luddy
An urgent appeal to North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper:
For every COVID-19 case in North Carolina (4,500 estimated), 125 people have lost their jobs (500,000 unemployed across the state). You created this tragedy.
Your executive orders have quarantined healthy individuals for the first time in American history. Small businesses can no longer operate, and their employees are jobless. This may be a solution for your medical advisers, but the results are now devastating nearly every facet of our society.
You have also effectively denied religious freedom, a God-given and constitutional right. Now you are in the process of stripping all our freedoms, purportedly to protect us from ourselves.
COVID-19 is a serious virus, but North Carolinians are intelligent and practical. Each person is very capable of avoiding COVID-19 by practicing social distancing, hand washing, and refraining from face touching. The vulnerable and those with COVID-19 must stay home, but healthy individuals need to return to work and sustain our economy.
It is important to put this virus into perspective. In 2009–10, 60 million Americans had SARS, and 18,000 died, but few remember this event because the government did not restrict freedoms.
We are grateful and thankful to medical personnel and the health-care industry for scaling up quickly and caring for those in need.
Your executive orders have inflicted severe pain and suffering on our state:
- The 500,000 who have filed for unemployment are just the beginning; soon there will be millions pleading for support.
- You vetoed the state budget, which means many agencies do not have the financial resources needed in this crisis.
- Because businesses cannot survive very long without revenue, thousands of small businesses soon will be permanently lost due to bankruptcy. The dreams and aspirations of their employees and families will be lost, as well.
- We now have widespread shortages of critically needed products such as paper goods, masks, and some food supplies. Since you have shuttered many producers, these shortages will become worse every week.
- Economies are fragile and interdependent; people and businesses rely on products and services provided by those shut down by your executive order. We are now witnessing a domino effect as more businesses close due to lack of supplies.
- Healthy people have been paralyzed in fear by the media and your health advisers to the point of great distrust and hysteria. Every citizen is now considered a suspect who may carry the virus, and even family members don’t trust one other. In calmer times, this may be referred to as (state-sponsored) paranoia.
- Your orders are creating lines to buy critically needed food and supplies at grocery stores. Your shutdown mandates may soon lead to food riots and violence.
- Child abuse, domestic abuse, and suicide and depression rates are spiking. Special needs children are floundering, and children who depend on school lunches are hungry. Cardiac disease and cancer (the two leading causes of death in the U.S.) patients are not receiving the critical care they need to survive.
- Hospitals are losing revenue and laying off medical personnel because they are not treating most patients and instead are waiting for COVID-19 cases, which are well below projections.
- North Carolina Certificate of Needs (CON) laws prohibit adding new hospital beds or equipment without state approval, which makes hospitals a state-sponsored monopoly, driving up costs and reducing care. You could call a special session this week and end CON, expanding medical care and lowering costs.
Your plan is to save us from COVID-19 based on virtually no data and death projections that were wildly overstated and are now being revised downward by the medical community. In the process, quality of life as we know it is rapidly declining, and thousands are without jobs. Every week you make life more difficult with more onerous regulations.
This is an urgent appeal to consider the destruction your orders are causing compared to the purported benefits.
You should allow all healthy workers and businesses to resume their roles as producers of critically needed goods and services for our families. Remember, economic destruction and job losses are measured in hours as your team talks in terms of months.
Your claim that your restrictions have slowed the virus may be valid, but the virus will not disappear because we stayed home. It is clear we have experienced almost a complete loss of freedom. By the end of this quarantine, our jobs and our way of life will have been decimated. No amount of government money or programs can repair a fragile, interdependent network that took hardworking people decades to build.
Most Americans want our products to be manufactured in America, but this is not possible because you have shut down our economy.
In truth, government interventions lead to trouble, cause further problems, and create more interventions.
Gov. Cooper, it is time to lead by following the example of many governors announcing this week the return of our freedom of association and our ability to support and feed our families.
All healthy individuals in North Carolina must return to work immediately, before our state economy and jobs are destroyed.
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Bob Luddy is president and founder of CaptiveAire commercial ventilation technologies, based in North Carolina.
Photo “Roy Cooper” by Roy Cooper. Background Photo “North Carolina Capitol” by Orchidus. CC BY-SA 4.0.
