Business owner to governor: ‘You created this tragedy’

FPI / April 15, 2020

A North Carolina business owner, in a letter to Gov. Roy Cooper, appealed to the governor to lift the coronavirus quarantine that the business owner says is devastating the state.

Bob Luddy, president and founder of CaptiveAire commercial ventilation technologies, made the appeal in a letter published by The American Spectator on April 14.

Luddy said that, for every reported case of coronavirus in North Carolina (4,500 estimated), 125 people have lost their jobs (500,000 unemployed across the state).

"You created this tragedy," Luddy said in the letter to Cooper.

"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," Luddy wrote.

Cooper has 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," Luddy wrote.

North Carolina's residents, Luddy wrote, "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."

Luddy noted that "economies are fragile and interdependent; people and businesses rely on products and services provided by those shut down" by Cooper's stay-at-home order. "We are now witnessing a domino effect as more businesses close due to lack of supplies."

Healthy people "have been paralyzed in fear by the media and your health advisers to the point of great distrust and hysteria," Luddy wrote. "Every citizen is now considered a suspect who may carry the virus, and even family members don’t trust one other. In calmer times, this may be referred to as (state-sponsored) paranoia."

Luddy continued: "Child abuse, domestic abuse, and suicide and depression rates are spiking. Special needs children are floundering, and children who depend on school lunches are hungry. Cardiac disease and cancer (the two leading causes of death in the U.S.) patients are not receiving the critical care they need to survive.

"Hospitals are losing revenue and laying off medical personnel because they are not treating most patients and instead are waiting for COVID-19 cases, which are well below projections.

"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."

Cooper "should allow all healthy workers and businesses to resume their roles as producers of critically needed goods and services for our families," Luddy wrote. "Remember, economic destruction and job losses are measured in hours as your team talks in terms of months."

Cooper's claim that his restrictions have slowed the virus "may be valid, but the virus will not disappear because we stayed home," Luddy wrote. "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."

Luddy concluded: "All healthy individuals in North Carolina must return to work immediately, before our state economy and jobs are destroyed."

Free Press International