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 H1N1, 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:
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.
Bob Luddy
CaptiveAire Founder & CEO
Bob Luddy is president and founder of CaptiveAire commercial ventilation technologies, based in North Carolina.