In last Tuesday’s column by Mayor Jason Shelton, he communicated that the Tupelo Economic Recovery Task Force is launching a campaign to encourage widespread compliance with the city and state masking ordinances as a show of responsible citizenship and community solidarity. We completely agree, and as we recently editorialized, we believe Gov. Reeves should reinstate the mask mandate statewide.
Mayor Shelton went on to explain that the primary message of the campaign will be to ‘Keep Tupelo Open,’ saying this “includes our churches, businesses, schools, health care system, and all other institutions and entities through which we experience a more normal and satisfying life.” We know the Mayor is not entertaining lockdowns, and we would never support them with the knowledge we have now after the experience this past spring.
Lockdowns were not wrong at that time, and the recommendation from the federal government to only wear a mask when caring for someone who was ill was not wrong at the time either. Our local, state and federal leadership was working with the best available data at the time.
We now know the devastation from the spring shutdown is still being felt economically by businesses, emotionally by our citizens, and physically by those that delayed other health care priorities not named COVID-19. The spring shutdown for some businesses luckily had federal dollars through the CARES Act that followed to help. A go it alone approach by any community at this time would have no financial help following a shutdown.
Last week, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and former U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator for President Obama, said, “our biggest threat for transmission is not the public square. It’s small family gatherings. Family gatherings where people become more comfortable. They remove their face mask, and they get together. And it’s this silent epidemic that begins to transmit. But it’s not intra-school transmission. The truth is, for kids K through 12, one of the safest places they can be, from our perspective, is to remain in school.”
A study by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, one of the most cited scientific journals, surveyed the effects of the coronavirus on small businesses. PNAS surveyed more than 5,800 small businesses between March 28 and April 4 and found the median small business with $10,000 in monthly expenses had about two weeks of cash on hand. This means most small businesses would have to have immediate layoffs of employees and most likely could not survive a closure that was long enough to have any kind of community effect on virus transmission, if any at all.
We support Mayor Shelton and the Tupelo Economic Recovery Task Force in campaigning to our community to wear masks, wash hands frequently and socially distance. We cannot ever support shutting down of our local businesses. We follow the words and advice from scientists advising President-elect Joe Biden who said as recently as last Friday, “I am not going to shut down the economy again.”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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