Displaying items by tag: lockdown

“The day the music died.”

I thought about that song a lot last year. The music didn’t die then, exactly, but rather faded like that final guitar riff, the one before the band waves and turns its collective back on the crowd, who stay hoping the lights don’t come on. Not yet, they plead. One more song.

CHAPEL HILL — It’s around lunchtime on a Wednesday in mid-July, the bright remnants of the morning quickly morphing into the typical hot, heavy Carolina afternoon. A dozen or so people — diners and drinkers — survey downtown Chapel Hill from atop a third-floor balcony at Top of the Hill Restaurant & Brewery.  

The worst part of COVID may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean we’re driving off into the sunset — at least not without a lot of baggage.

Thanks in large part to COVID lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives. 

RALEIGH — Bar owners from six counties across North Carolina are going to court to challenge the governor’s executive orders shutting down their businesses. Their lawsuit seeks to have a key piece of the state Emergency Management Act declared unconstitutional.

RALEIGH — About 25% of gyms in the U.S. will close by year’s end, a new study shows. 

Gov. Roy Cooper — and scores of politicians like them — have since March imposed noxious closures and lockdowns with the altruistic goal of keeping us safe. In reality, these government-imposed suppressions have done little but wreck our mental and physical health and devastate our economy.

The COVID pandemic this year has profoundly transformed the relationship of government to American citizens. Constitutional leashes have been obliterated as state and local politicians and officials have issued endless decrees that were vastly more effective at destroying freedom than at curbing a virus. And the Biden administration may soon take further leaps towards making our political system into a Cage Keeper Democracy where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest. 

In these past couple of weeks, two important studies have been published that could dramatically increase our understanding of the COVID-19 disease. Adding to the science of how we understand and treat this disease is something that should be welcomed, because properly understood it can save lives.

RALEIGH — More students face repeating a grade than any time in the past century, says David Stegall, deputy superintendent of innovation at the N.C. Department of Public Instruction.