Governor Roy Cooper on Wednesday laid out a possible path towards eventually lifting certain restrictions in North Carolina, saying that the state faces a “new normal” while still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking at a news conference at the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh, Cooper said any changes to school and business closures and operating guidelines would have to be weighed against protecting residents from a dangerous second wave of the coronavirus.
“This virus is going to be with us until there is a vaccine, which may be a year or more away,” Cooper said. “That means that as we ease restrictions, we are going to enter a new normal.”
“We want to get back to work while at the same time preventing a spike that will overwhelm our hospitals with COVID-19 cases,” the governor said.
Cooper said expert modeling has shown it would be dangerous to lift the restrictions all at once because it would increase the chances that hospitals become overwhelmed and unable to care for severely ill patients.
“Because we acted early and because we acted together, we have averted the devastating scenarios we have seen playing out in other parts of our country and across the globe,” said N.C. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen.
Cooper also emphasized that changes in restrictions must protect public health, especially those who are most vulnerable to severe illness, including people over age 65, those with underlying health conditions and people living in congregate settings.
“Experts tell us it would be dangerous to lift our restrictions all at once. Rather than an on/off light switch, we are viewing this as a dimmer switch that can be adjusted incrementally,” Cooper said.
“We now need to look ahead at how we stay ahead of the curve,” Cohen said. “Widespread testing, aggressive contact tracing, and data-informed policy decisions are our best tools to keep our communities safe and protect our frontline workers.”
According to a statement from the Governor’s Office, the state needs to make more progress in three areas: testing, tracing and trends.
TESTING
State planning relies on an increase in testing capabilities to identify, isolate and track new cases of COVID-19. This means having the supplies and lab capacity to do more testing across the state. Dr. Mandy Cohen, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has brought together laboratory partners from the public and private sector to coordinate efforts to ensure testing – diagnostic and antibody – is widely available across the state while also conserving protective equipment.
TRACING
Tracing requires the state to boost the public health workforce and ability to trace contacts of new cases of COVID-19. Contact tracing can be effective at containing new outbreaks, but it requires more personnel. When a person tests positive, the tracing efforts will help identify who that individual may have been in contact with so those people can get tested and take the right precautions. NC DHHS is working with its partners to increase this critical piece of our public health workforce. New digital tools can also help scale this effort.
TRENDS
In order to ease restrictions, the state needs to understand how COVID-19 is impacting the state and impacting specific populations and regions of the state to determine when to strengthen or ease social distancing policies. Trends that will influence policy decisions will be based on data like the new positive cases, hospitalizations, deaths, as well as available supply of personal protective equipment, hospital capacity.
