No Evidence Supporting North Carolina Governor’s Uneven Closure of Bars: Court

No evidence supports the decision by North Carolina’s governor to close some bars while letting others stay open, a court ruled on April 16. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in an executive order in March 2020 forced all bars in the state to close. Two months later, he issued a new executive order that allowed bars inside restaurants to reopen but required others to remain shuttered. The first order might have been reasonable but the second was irrational, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina said in the new ruling. “Defendant’s ‘science and data’ tends to show that bars in general did present a heightened risk of COVID-19 transmission, as people normally gather, drink, and talk in bars of all sorts. We have considered the ‘science and data’ presented by defendant to justify the distinction between closing some types of bars and not others, but this information does not support defendant’s position, even if we consider all such information to be true,” Judge April Wood wrote in the unanimous opinion....