The governor is ready to start reopening NC. What does that look like?

Gov. Roy Cooper is preparing plans this week to reopen the North Carolina economy, and an announcement on his proposed path ahead will come Thursday. There’s some pressure on Cooper — neighboring governors have taken aggressive steps to loosen and remove stay-at-home restrictions, and “reopen” advocates want the same to happen here. We hope and expect Cooper to be thoughtful in balancing commerce and public health. It’s worked for him and North Carolina so far.

The governor, however, should do the following moving forward:

First, Cooper needs to clarify what his stay-at-home order currently allows and forbids. There’s some confusion surrounding which N.C. businesses are allowed to operate, and the governor should explain plainly where we stand, which might surprise some people:

Other than restaurants and 16 types of businesses listed in Executive Order 120 - including gyms, hair salons and movie theaters — North Carolina lets its counties decide what’s open. If you live in counties such as Mecklenburg and Wake that have stricter stay-at-home orders than the state’s, you must follow your county’s rules. But if you live in a county with no stay-at-home order, then any business not on the governor’s list can operate so long as it follows social distancing guidelines. That includes non-essential businesses, the Department of Revenue says.

All of which means that North Carolina’s rules are not dissimilar to those in South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster announced this week that some retail stores — including sporting goods stores, books, music, shoe and craft stores — can reopen. The big difference? McMaster’s decree applies to all S.C. counties and cities. Cooper, to this point, has allowed counties to adopt stricter rules than the state.

We think that should continue. If county officials believe state restrictions are insufficient to contain COVID-19 locally, they should be allowed to make tighter rules for their constituents.

As for counties that want to loosen restrictions? That’s trickier, given that such decisions carry public health risks for their geographic neighbors. Cooper should require that data-driven public health benchmarks be met before counties can lift restrictions on businesses. Counties could, hypothetically, begin a limited opening of restaurant dining areas after 14 days of decreasing cases of new COVID-19 infections — or, ideally, using more precise metrics such as those found in the Surgo Foundation’s COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index map.

A Cooper spokesperson told the Editorial Board on Wednesday that the governor and his coronavirus task force are working with health and business leaders to determine those metrics, which will include personnel, testing and equipment needs. Whatever benchmarks they land on, the metrics should be made clear upfront by the governor and DHHS officials, and people should be able to track how their counties are progressing toward reopening. That will take transparency, which has been problematic for a governor and DHHS that recently tried to obscure public death certificate information.

That road to reopening remains a long one. North Carolina is in the early stages of gathering testing and tracing data, which Cooper and health officials need to fully open the state for business. Patience is both necessary and hard, but it can be made easier with clear goals and direction from the governor. North Carolinians need to understand more than the public health reasons behind stay-at-home orders; they need to know and understand the path that leads out of these woods.

This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 3:41 PM.