Shelter-in-place is a sensible next step for North Carolina

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has been both thoughtful and aggressive in moving to slow the COVID-19 virus. On Friday, he announced the next and most significant step: a stay-at-home order that requires North Carolinians to stay at home except for essential tasks. The order goes into effect 5 p.m. Monday. It’s a reasonable and sensible measure for the health and safety of our state.

Earlier in the week, Cooper gave individual counties the green light to make their own call. Mecklenburg officials did just that Tuesday, declaring a “stay at home” order that went into effect Thursday morning. Durham leaders announced a stay at home order Wednesday, as did Guilford and Cabarrus, a suburban Charlotte county.

“Shelter in place” orders in several cities, counties and states - including Washington state late Monday - have required people to stay home unless they are performing essential tasks such as grocery shopping. In some locations, restaurants can still provide delivery and curbside service, and people can still jog, walk or hike outdoors as long as they maintain safe distances from one another.

The public health calculation behind such orders is simple: COVID-19 spreads through people coughing and exhaling viral particles, or touching contaminated surfaces, and that spread can be slowed if people practice social distancing and avoid crowds. A shelter-in-place order could be critical to avoiding a catastrophic overload of hospitals and health-care facilities that has led to thousands of deaths in Italy and elsewhere.

It’s also why Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he “strongly supports” the shelter-in-place orders that have been issued thus far. “We now are still in the escalation phase,” he said in a Facebook interview this week. “How high that gets and how long it’s going to take to turn around is going to depend on how well we do containment and mitigation.”

All of which doesn’t mean a shelter-in-place order was an easy call for Cooper. A lockdown of non-essential businesses will be another blow to North Carolina’s economy, and such a decision could face some backlash in counties that haven’t seen any or many cases thus far. Some also worry that such orders could bring a boomerang effect - that they might cause panic or defiance that could in turn threaten further spread of the virus.

To be clear: Even with a statewide shelter-in-place order, grocery stores will remain open, so there’s no sense in panic shopping. Grocers have been telling officials throughout the state and country that the supply chain is strong enough to provide food for everyone, and that if people can resist the temptation to hoard, shelves will be stocked at closer to normal levels.

We can do our part in other ways, as well. We can support local businesses by ordering contact-less delivery. We can tip those delivery people well and, if we’re able, send money to those whose services we can’t use right now or people who can’t work. Mostly, we can heed the advice of public health experts and self-isolate whenever possible.

We believe North Carolinians are quickly realizing - if they haven’t already - the severity of the coronavirus. Reports how it is spreading throughout the state, including to those rural counties that hadn’t officially been touched by it until now. Now that a shelter-in-place order has come from Cooper, we hope and expect that North Carolinians will understand it, heed it and collectively do our part to fight COVID-19’s surge.

This story was originally published March 23, 2020 at 10:09 AM.