Recent editorials from North Carolina newspapers:
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May 26
The Winston-Salem Journal on how legislators can lead by example when it comes to wearing masks:
Practice social distancing, health leaders here and in Washington tell us. Keep 6 feet apart. Wash hands frequently. Wear a mask in public.
With North Carolina moving into the second stage of reopening, those warnings are even more important. Public health experts and scientists caution that a new wave of COVID-19 infection could be coming. We should be mindful of the danger.
But other state leaders - namely, many of the lawmakers at work in the General Assembly in Raleigh - are noticeably not following at least two of those three bits of advice. Only they know how careful they are about hand washing, but it’s easy to see that lawmakers are jammed together, and many are not wearing masks.
At least leaders in the state House have been holding some committee meetings by videoconference and voting by proxy. As businesses and agencies across the country have learned, there are ways to hold meetings and get things done without being face to face.
To be fair, the Legislative Building does make social distancing tough. People crowd into hallways, stairwells and committee rooms. In the House and Senate chambers, seats are about half the recommended distance apart.
And, yes, anyone entering the building must have a temperature check, but one of the dangerous things about COVID-19 is that people can spread it before they have symptoms.
At the very least, lawmakers, staffers and everyone who works in the building should wear a mask.
It’s true that the cloth masks most of us can get our hands on are not as effective as medical-grade masks in protecting the wearer from infection. But wearing them makes it less likely that people will spread the virus to those around them.
In other words, people should wear masks out of concern for others.
The coronavirus spreads mainly through droplets in the air when someone coughs or sneezes or talks or sings. If you’re wearing a mask, many droplets collect on the inside instead of spreading.
When people are indoors in close quarters - for example, the Legislative Building - wearing a mask becomes even more important.
It shouldn’t be a question of individual choice, because those who don’t wear masks aren’t choosing not to protect themselves. They are choosing not to protect others.
Another reason lawmakers should wear masks is that they are leaders. They should set a good example. Americans were grossly unprepared for the pandemic. When it started spreading noticeably in March, mixed messages and confusion spread with it. We were told not to wear masks before we were told to wear them. We were told this virus was not as bad as the flu before we were told it was worse.
And everything becomes political. Some people think they are standing up for their rights by not wearing a mask or keeping their distance.
There’s plenty of room to disagree about how to deal with the pandemic, how to balance public safety with the need to get on with our lives. But we all ought to agree that COVID-19 is real and there are reasonable things we can do to combat it.
By wearing masks as they go about their work, our state’s leaders can make that point.
Online: https://www.journalnow.com
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May 26
The Fayetteville Observer on 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.:
This week will mark a grim milestone for the United States in the fight against novel coronavirus. COVID-19, the disease it causes, will have killed 100,000 Americans.
The toll is the biggest in the world and seems almost unbelievable. Just as unsettling is that the virus is not fully contained, as states reopen from lockdowns meant to stop its spread. Our state on May 23 saw its highly daily number of infections with more than 1,100, even as the state loosened restrictions. On top of that, public health officials say a second wave of the virus is possible in the fall.
How did we get here? It may take some time for the experts to fully unpack that. But for sure the country’s inconsistent, patchwork response, which early on ran well behind the curve, shares a big share of the blame.
Donald Trump’s White House moved too slow, although he steadfastly rejects any blame in the U.S. response. On the campaign trail, he dismissed the seriousness of a virus he predicted would just one day disappear. Asked if he was concerned about the virus in January he said: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control.”
Trump did move on Jan. 31 to ban most travel from China, where the virus had originated. But Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 person at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote an article released in May that the government should have issued travel alerts sooner for heavily-infected Europe. A European travel ban was imposed on March 11, while 2 million travelers came from there to the U.S. during the month of February.
“The extensive travel from Europe, once Europe was having outbreaks, really accelerated our importations and the rapid spread,” Schuchat told the Associated Press.
The CDC itself takes part of the blame, too. It botched and then had to abandon a test it had distributed to detect the coronavirus, which cost the country several crucial weeks. Then too, the federal government did not move quickly enough to engage private companies to develop testing, according to reporting in The Washington Post and other media outlets. Other countries were in the mean time conducting mass testing based on a German-designed protocol distributed by the World Health Organization.
By the time U.S. states started rolling out testing and contact tracing, the virus had already broken out. Without a strong federal response, states pursued 50 individual strategies to contain the virus. Most imposed some kind of lockdown to keep their residents away from each other, a strategy used in other countries to contain COVID-19. Different models found that if states had started lockdowns even one week earlier in March, 36,000 more deaths would have been prevented.
A handful of states never locked down. And there has been a wide range of approaches and timelines toward reopening, with Georgia making the leap in late April and states like Michigan and California remaining closed.
THE VIRUS DIVIDE
The actions of individual Americans have also been all over the place. Some people faithfully wear masks in public and others continue to remain at home. On the other hand, images that emerged from Memorial Day weekend, from a crowded boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland, to a packed-in pool at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, suggest that many Americans are simply declaring the crisis over. The photos show no attempt made at social distancing and very few facial coverings, which have become common features in other countries.
Increasingly, Americans cannot even agree on the scope of the crisis. There are protests, some armed, at state capitals like Raleigh calling for an immediate reopening. Conversely, polls show a strong majority believe states are reopening too soon.
In some places, fear has crept in - the kind that comes from uncertainty over who has the virus, which can be spread while the carrier has no symptoms. A hair salon in Wilkesboro posted a sign it would no longer serve customers who work for Tyson Foods, a nearby poultry-processing plant where there have been nearly 600 positive cases of COVID-19.
Although state health officials tout the increase in the number and availability of tests, it seems plain the kind of free, widespread testing that will give more people confidence to sally forth in the world of work and play has not yet arrived.
POLITICS AND THE HUMAN TOLL
We continue to believe a national, coordinated, mass-testing strategy would be best, but the Trump Administration has made clear such is not in the cards. A report the White House released to Congress on May 24 said testing will be left to the states, with the federal government providing guidance.
Trump himself has increasingly turned his attention away from the medical aspects of the virus and toward reopening the economy, which he sees as a linchpin for being reelected in November. On Memorial Day, he wrote a series of tweets that called on Gov. Roy Cooper to immediately approve a full-on Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for Charlotte in August, with no crowd restrictions related to the lockdown.
Meanwhile, The New York Times in its May 24 Sunday edition published the names and brief bios of 1,000 victims of COVID-19, representing just 1 percent of the total. The presentation, titled, “An Incalculable Loss” took up the entire front page and jumped inside. It showed the virus victims as not just statistics, but people who mattered to other people.
The newspaper pulled information from local papers’ obituaries, news articles and other information. Among those represented from North Carolina, where nearly 800 have died, were:
“Landon Spradlin, 66, of Concord, a preacher and blues guitarist;
“Daniel S. Pincu, 80, of Asheville, an Army veteran, business owner, free spirit and kvetch;
“Arthur Rogers, 93, of Mooresville, who served on the Manhattan Project; and
“Adelfo Ruiz Calvo, 65, of Sanford, an employee of the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry processing plant.”
We should be clear. The coronavirus pandemic has walloped the entire world, and has an extremely high infection rate. The United States in any scenario was going to lose thousands of lives.
But we should also recognize there were blown opportunities. We need to correct them for the further mitigation of this virus - and to prepare for the next one.
Online: https://www.fayobserver.com
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May 22
The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer on distorted coronavirus data and statistics:
The nation’s pandemic problem is also becoming a math problem.
As scientists and doctors urge caution and business interests push for a wider reopening, coronavirus statistics are being distorted through ideological lenses. That is a discouraging and divisive turn that undermines the public’s clear understanding of the coronavirus threat.
Democratic and Republican leaders should be urging people to rely on the judgment of experts about what the numbers say. Instead random people are taking to paid advertisements, letters to the editor and social media to present their own calculations about death rates, risks by age and geographic patterns of infection.
The debate about when and how to reopen the economy has turned partisans into amateur statisticians. In North Carolina, they pore over numbers posted on a COVID-19 dashboard on the website of the Department of Health and Human Services. Some see the numbers as dire, others see them as reassuring.
The boldest assertions come from reopen advocates. Some, for instance, claim the numbers show that the chance of dying from COVID-19 in North Carolina is less than one half of 1 percent. But, looked at another way, among the confirmed cases of infection, about 3.5 percent have died. (Many more have been hospitalized.)
A full-page News & Observer ad purchased by an individual said the state’s numbers show that there is no grave danger in letting mayors and county officials decide what local businesses can be open.
DHHS Secretary Mandy Cohen has added more granular statistics to her department’s website, but she told the Editorial Board that the numbers still get misinterpreted or considered only in isolation. For example, she said, the death rate is not the only measure that matters. The rate of hospitalizations also shows the seriousness of the threat and indicates whether the state’s health systems have the capacity to handle it.
Cohen also stressed that the statistics measure an evolving situation, not a settled one. It won’t be until the pandemic is over, she said, “that we can get some of the statistics people want in the moment.”
Despite all the numbers being tossed about, some important ones are still unknown. How many people have died of COVID-19 who weren’t tested for it? How many people are infected? How many have recovered?
Leonard Stefanski, head of N.C. State University’s Department of Statistics, said that interpreting the DHHS numbers has another often overlooked caveat – real vs. potential.
“The North Carolina statistics reflect what actually happened; they do not reflect what would have happened in the absence of public health orders by the governor,” he said. “What would the statistics be today if there had been no interventions?”
Even with total cases unknown, he said, it’s clear that the COVID-19 fatality rate skews heavily toward people over 65. “The risk to older people is about 40 times the risk to younger people,” he said, but he added that the rate needs context: “For sure, the young are not as likely to die, but here’s where an infectious disease expert is needed to comment on how likely they are to transmit the disease to others, who are more likely to die from the disease.”
In the end, our response to the pandemic shouldn’t be about statistics alone. It should be about people first, especially how we protect those who are most at risk because of their age or an underlying health condition.
So far, concern for the vulnerable has guided the state’s response. That shouldn’t change as North Carolina warily enters a second phase of reopening.
Online: https://www.newsobserver.com
Online: https://www.charlotteobserver.com
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