COOPER

June 23. As Gov. Roy Cooper ponders exactly when to move to Phase 2.5 or Phase 3 reopening, it turns out North Carolina is about in the middle of all 50 states ranked by fewest coronavirus restrictions.

We’re No. 32 on the list as researched by WalletHub. The state with the fewest restrictions is South Dakota; the most: New Mexico. Neighboring states South Carolina came in at No. 4, while Georgia was No. 14 and Virginia was 44th, meaning its COVID-19 restrictions are among the toughest nationwide. To view the full WalletHub study, click here.

Reopening is not the simplest thing in the world, according to Kelsey Hample, Ph.D., a professor in the economics department at Furman University.

HAMPLE

Being sick is costly

“Epidemiologists warn that if we open too early, the spread of COVID-19 will increase exponentially again. This will renew the economic issues we are already facing,” Hample said.

If a person cannot work, he or she might lose income or the employer may have to pay a wage without producing something of value.

“If a person is sick, he may have high hospital bills. In that case, he may have less disposable income to spend or his (and all of our) insurance costs might increase. If many people are sick, supply chains may become disrupted, leaving some firms without quick access to the markets they traditionally sell to or without quick access to their input markets. For the same reasons we took stay-at-home precautions in March, we should be cautious of reopening too much too early,” Hample said.

Methodology

WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 16 key metrics, ranging from whether child-care programs and restaurants have reopened to the presence or absence of a “shelter-in-place” order.

Hample said business rent, utilities and debt payments should be paused or discounted to be collected over a later time.

“Targeting individual households may be more difficult, but freezing or reducing rent/mortgage, utility, and debt payments for financially burdened individuals would help. Freezing those payments for all households, however, would put unnecessary strain on the creditors,” she said.