On paper, the dumbest moves by governors related to the coronavirus pandemic happened in Florida and Georgia. In Florida, Ron DeSantis amended his stay-at-home executive order to declare church services an essential activity. Never mind that numerous stories about large numbers of people getting sick after attending church functions should have proven that having in-person church services is simply reckless. Indeed, Hillsborough County (Tampa) county commission chairman Les Miller warned that “our hospitals better get ready.
In Georgia, a provision of Brian Kemp’s two-week stay-at-home order reopens all beaches in the state—even those that had been closed at the local level. Supposedly, social distancing will be enforced and no gatherings will be allowed. But it’s beyond belief that Kemp even thought this was a good idea, in light of the scenes of people frolicking on the beaches during spring break—the event that, to my mind, triggered the rash of stay-at-home orders.
So what governor could have possibly been dumber than that? Well, West Virginia’s Jim Justice may have found a way to pull it off. He appeared to blame Hobby Lobby for causing a coronavirus outbreak in the state’s Eastern Panhandle—without sufficient evidence to make such an explosive claim
At a press conference yesterday, Justice detonated a bombshell. He’d received word that Berkeley, Morgan and Jefferson counties—the counties closest to Washington—had become a hot zone. Justice and West Virginia’s coronavirus czar, WVU health sciences associate dean Clay Marsh, had received reports of 60 positive coronavirus tests in Berkeley and Jefferson counties.
By Friday night, Justice had signed an executive order banning all gatherings of more than five people in Berkeley, Morgan and Jefferson counties. This goes further than the 10-person limit that was in place when Justice issued a statewide stay-at-home order on March 23. It also gives those counties’ health departments the power to limit the occupancy of any business still open.
All good and well, right? However, Justice may have fumbled the execution eight ways to Sunday. He tried to point the finger at a Hobby Lobby in Martinsburg—even though his own state health officer, Cathy Slemp, tried to point out that they couldn’t definitively pinpoint a source for the outbreak.
“I think we had a Hobby Lobby deal and you know that was a potential problem there and just different things,” he said near the beginning of the press conference.
He later said, “From what I’ve been fed so far I was told some information about the Hobby Lobby, but y’all can elaborate please.”
Slemp again said the spread is not specific to any particular facility.
The Hobby Lobby store in Martinsburg was already listed as closed on Friday and no one answered calls there.
Now, Hobby Lobby deserves to be pilloried for its handling of the pandemic. You may know that it obstinately refused to close even when it was apparent this was becoming a BFD because the wife of company founder and CEO David Green had gotten a “word from the Lord” to stay open. Several stores even tried to defy state and local directives closing all nonessential businesses, even though there is no way in the world that a craft store is essential. Hobby Lobby finally got its head out of its butt and closed all stores on Friday.
But to accuse a store of causing an outbreak merely based on “what I’ve been fed so far” is beyond reckless. You simply do not make an accusation like that without hard evidence. It’s one thing to call out churches for holding in-person services at this point. But that’s based on hard, irrefutable evidence of outbreaks being traced to church gatherings.
WRC-TV in Washington was being way too kind in calling this briefing “jumbled.” I’d go further. Even with Slemp stepping in, it could potentially put Justice in serious legal trouble. I’m no fan of Hobby Lobby, but unless Justice can furnish some hard evidence that Hobby Lobby turned the Eastern Panhandle into a hot zone, he needs to apologize.