Recent editorials from North Carolina newspapers:
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June 23
The Fayetteville Observer on the need for a statewide mask requirement:
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper should make wearing masks a statewide requirement to help in the fight against COVID-19. It is the right thing to do to protect the health and lives of people of this state, and to boost the economy, too.
State health officials have urged, cajoled, advised and strongly encouraged people to practice social distancing in public settings and, when distancing is not possible, to wear a facial covering. These two practices, and the washing of hands, are particularly important as the state reopens businesses, churches and other facilities.
But too many people are ignoring the messages. It’s not working. We can go over the reasons why at some point, but we have a public health crisis that needs to be addressed right now.
Statewide, our numbers on the virus are moving in the wrong direction, state Health Director Mandy Cohen reported on June 22. There are a near-record 870 people in hospitals with COVID-19. There are 53,605 positive cases and more than 1,200 deaths. A key metric, the percent of positive cases, hovers between nine and 10 percent; it is a number officials would like to see reduced to 5 percent.
Here in Cumberland County the news is more encouraging. But lack of social distancing - people keeping the recommended 6 feet apart from others in public - was one sour note struck by Scott Bullard, the city’s emergency management director, in his June 22 report to the Fayetteville City Council.
Bullard said Cape Fear Valley Medical Center was consistently reporting its number of COVID-19 patients in the “lower 20s.” He called that outstanding compared to other hospitals.
“However, more than ever, we’ve got to do the social distancing, the wearing of the masks, waiting 6 feet apart, washing our hands,” he said.
Bullard said everywhere he looks he sees social distancing compliance dipping. We have observed same.
The backdrop of his remarks is the potential for a Phase Three reopening of more businesses, which could happen as soon as June 26, when the order for Phase Two expires. But we join others who wonder if the state will really go ahead, with our numbers being what they are. Cooper, a Democrat, has talked of a “Phase 2.5,” even as Republicans in the N.C. General Assembly have passed bills to try to force a quicker reopening.
POLITICAL FIGHT
This brings us to the frustrating political aspect of the fight against the virus. Many of the loudest voices over the last couple of months in favor of a speedier reopening have also been the ones questioning the need for people to wear masks when they go out. Some Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, are less likely to advocate for wearing masks than their Democratic colleagues. Just last week, GOP state legislators from Craven and Cabarrus counties shared on Facebook a debunked post that said wearing masks causes a lung condition called pleurisy.
But there are hopeful signs this attitude is changing. Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is in a tight race with Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham, said in a telephone town hall on June 22 that mask-wearing reduces the virus’ spread. He said: “It’s a short-term inconvenience for a long-term benefit” to help reopen businesses and protect at-risk people.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, which has pursued a fast reopening, strongly pushed mask-wearing and distancing at a press conference this week, as COVID-19 cases spike there. Afterward, the state’s Republican House Speaker, Dennis Bonnen, was more blunt. He said people not wearing masks would prevent more people from going back to work. “It’s time to mask up,” he said in a statement. “It’s time to employ personal responsibility - a key tenet of ensuring liberty and freedom.”
Meanwhile the scientific community - driven by multiple studies establishing the benefit of everyone wearing a mask - is hardening into consensus in advocating the practice. The World Health Organization, trailing many public health officials, finally said on June 5 that everyone should wear cloth masks in public spaces. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has held that position since early April. In countries that have done a better job than here of containing the virus, including South Korea and Germany, people wearing masks in public has been a key component.
Americans’ independence streak sometimes runs up smack against new measures that suddenly require everyone to adopt an unfamiliar practice. There was a similar resistance to wearing seat belts. But now the country’s seat-belt use is almost 90 percent.
The novel coronavirus will not be the last pandemic we face. Mask-wearing at critical points to contain these diseases needs to be part of the new normal.
By requiring masks, North Carolina would join states like Virginia and California in leading the way - and setting an example on how to protect both our people and our economy.
Online: https://www.fayobserver.com
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June 23
The Winston-Salem Journal on calls to test all inmates for the coronavirus:
While some in North Carolina struggle to make it without haircuts or visits to the gym, inmates in our prison system struggle simply to maintain personal distance from others who could be transmitting a deadly virus. Considering the cramped conditions, it’s not an easy battle.
Since the virus first began spreading, five inmates have died. In addition, a prison nurse at Caswell Correctional Center died last month.
The response to this problem from state officials has been lackluster - not much sympathy is lost on prisoners - and as a result, some of our state’s prisons have turned into viral hot spots.
As of June 22, in Albemarle Correctional Institution, a medium-custody prison about 50 miles east of Charlotte, at least 60 inmates had been infected with COVID-19, making it the site of the third-largest outbreak in North Carolina’s prison system.
The largest was at Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro, where more than 460 inmates were diagnosed during mass testing in April. The second-largest was at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, in Raleigh, where more than 90 inmates tested positive.
Prison employees - guards and staffers - have shared in that toxic mix. Twelve prison staff members at Albemarle Correctional have tested positive. And some employees have likely transmitted the virus to others outside of prisons.
There’s a bit more hope, though, thanks to a court mandate ordering the state to release a plan to test all 31,200 inmates in the prison system, as well as all 21,000 prison employees. (Prison employees already had access to testing, though testing wasn’t required.) The order is the result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina, the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
The state released a plan last week, ahead of the June 22 deadline, and also started testing inmates, Commissioner of Prisons Todd Ishee said. “Our top priority is everyone’s health and their safety - and I mean everyone,” he said at a June 18 news conference.
Sure. And it only took a court order.
As of June 22, almost 3,500 inmates had been tested, with 774 positive results. That’s about 25%, far above the infection rate of the general public. If that ratio holds for the entire system, around 8,000 inmates may have been infected.
The process is expected to take 60 days to complete and cost about $3.3 million, Ishee said.
That seems like a long time.
Testing is essential to get a clear picture of what’s happening in the prisons - contrary to what one prominent politician seems to think, the virus doesn’t go away just because we haven’t tested for it. None of those who tested positive in Albemarle had shown symptoms - yet.
The ACLU argues that the only way to allow prisoners to achieve social distancing is to decrease its number of prisoners. To their credit, prison officials have so far released about 700 nonviolent prisoners who meet certain criteria, either to home confinement or some other type of supervised early release. But that’s not enough to ensure prisoners’ or workers’ safety.
Obviously, those who are ill need to be able to access adequate medical care, also.
It’s easy to say prison inmates deserve what they get. Such cold attitudes ignore their humanity, their capacity for redemption and the fact that they’re currently paying for their crimes without also having to fight a pandemic. If “all lives matter,” these certainly do, and they deserve protections from the virus that is still active in our communities.
Online: https://www.journalnow.com
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June 20
The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer on the debate over a North Carolina law that restricts the removal of some Confederate monuments:
North Carolina’s Republican leaders are calling for law and order and blaming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper for not intervening when protesters pulled down two Confederate statues at the State Capitol on June 19 and, in a ghastly echo of the lynching era, hung one from a light post.
If anyone, the Republicans should be pointing the finger of blame at themselves.
It was Republican state lawmakers who incited the mayhem. And it is Cooper who who acted to end it on June 20 by boldly having all remaining Confederate statues removed from the Capitol grounds. He should tell local governments they are free to do the same if they’re worried about threats to public safety.
At the heart of this trouble is the law the Republican-led General Assembly passed in 2015. They acted to block a backlash against Confederate monuments after a white supremacist slaughtered nine black church members in Charleston, S.C. The law, with a few exceptions, bars state agencies and local governments from removing any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”
With that, the match was struck and the fires keep burning. There was the pulling down of a Confederate statue outside the old Durham County Courthouse after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville. Then came the toppling of the Silent Sam Confederate statue in Chapel Hill. More bitterness arose around the removal of a Confederate statue in Pittsboro. And on June 19, fueled by the national George Floyd protests, protesters again acted to take down symbols of racism that the misbegotten state law protects.
Cooper asked that Confederate statues be removed from state property in 2017. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery,” he said. “These monuments should come down.”
The law blocked his request and the legislators refused to change it.
Now the architects of this obstacle to reconciliation are complaining about the unrest it’s causing.
“When our leaders turn a blind eye to chaos, destruction and discord, society begins to unravel,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a Republican candidate for governor. Senate leader Phil Berger issued his own pronouncement: “Leadership is not ceding the law to a mob.”
Someone should provide these supposed defenders of North Carolina history with a history book. They might offer “Wilmington’s Lie,” a new book by North Carolina journalist David Zucchino, which chronicles the 1898 attack by a white mob on a black-owned newspaper that left dozens dead in Wilmington. Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate Army veteran, was among the speakers who exhorted a white crowd to rise up because Blacks had won political control of the city. He said: “We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses!”
Three years earlier, Waddell had spoken at the dedication of the 75-foot-tall memorial to the Confederate dead that includes the two bronze statutes that were pulled down on June 19.
Some condemn the white supremacists, but also those who tear down their monuments. “There is a process,” they say, for peacefully removing them. But there is no real process. There is a law that blocks proceeding. The people who put that obstacle there are responsible for the anger that spills over it. It isn’t about law and order. It’s about a law that ignites disorder.
If Republicans won’t repeal it, they too, in November, should be removed.
Online: http://www.newsobserver.com
Online: http://www.charlotteobserver.com
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