Egged on by a president with a reelection campaign in mind, states seem to be dividing along
geographical lines in response to the coronavirus pandemic and growing pressure to roll back stay-at-home orders and get Americans out and spending. "We are opening up America again,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday during his White House briefing. It was the same day the coronavirus death toll increased to more than 44,000, CNN reported.
“Twenty states representing 40% of the population have announced that they are making plans and preparations to safely restart their economies in the very near future,” the president said. “We can't break our country over this. We have to get going." And by “get going” he seems to mean opening nonessential businesses at all costs, and state leaders aren’t exactly whispering about the choices they’re making between saving lives and saving the economy. They’re shouting them.
Governors have already committed to weakening earlier imposed stay-at-home orders in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, to name a few on The Hill’s list of state reopening plans. "We can't wait until there's a cure to this," Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves told Fox News Sunday. "We can't wait until every single person can get tested every single day to open up our economy. We have serious mental health issues going on in this country right now. And we also have a serious economic crisis going on in this country right now."
However, governors in California, Oregon, and Washington are partnering to make a collective decision on reopening their states. That decision will be based on when leaders observe a drop in the coronavirus' spread, according to Business Insider. "West Coast is guided by science,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted on Monday. “We issued stay at home orders early to keep the public healthy. We'll open our economies with that same guiding principle."
What’s right vs. what makes money: It’s a divide that has long persisted in America and seems to align with a long-observed north vs. south divide. It dates back to decades before the Civil War, when the Mason-Dixon line was etched out to stop sparring colonists from infringing on each other’s territories. It became a figurative division between the North and the South, with northern states advocating for the abolition of slavery and southern states hoping to cling fiercely to the system of free labor sustaining their way of life.
To this day, the very real manifestation of that ideological difference for Black people still sparks a fear so deep that it gives my family pause before we take a road trip through the Deep South. We decided to do it, and we were predictably stopped in Mississippi by a white deputy for failing to pull over when passing a stalled law enforcement vehicle.
Now, the fear top of mind for me is what will happen to Black people, already disproportionately affected by the virus, when Georgia
Gov. Brian Kemp loosens the restrictions he put in place earlier this month and lets gyms, hair and nail salons, barbershops, and the like reopen Friday. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black woman,
said the governor's decision wasn't based on "anything logical."
“We see our numbers are continuing to tick up in this state, we see that our deaths are rising,” she said. “We have some of the highest asthma rates in the country right here in Atlanta.” Black residents make up more than 50% of the city’s population, and the death rate among COVID-19 patients was increasing when the governor made his announcement, Lance Bottoms said. More than 835 people had died of causes related to the virus in Georgia by Wednesday, and that count is up from 811 on Monday,
according to the state’s public health department.