SANDERS: Looks like Cooper moved his reopening goalposts again just in time

RALEIGH – Governor Roy Cooper is holding North Carolinians hostage to a Pandemic Panic regime that doesn’t seem interested in fully loosening its grip. A couple weeks ago, Cooper issued conditions for the hostages to be released, but it turns out he knew those demands could not be met.

Jon Sanders, director of regulatory studies at the John Locke Foundation, notes in his reliably insightful Locker Room blog, the Cooper is keeping the goal posts just out of reach:

“Last week, I discussed the arbitrary and capricious nature of Cooper’s invented “metrics for reopening,” none of which he has demonstrably meant and all of which the media invariably treated as received wisdom up to the very second he abandoned them.

His newest metric he doesn’t mean is “once two-thirds of adult North Carolinians have received at least one vaccine dose and if trends remain stable.” (Another way we know he doesn’t mean that metric? He doesn’t account for people with natural immunity — i.e., those who have recovered from an infection and those already with antibodies against a Covid infection.)

As of May 3, the proportion vaccinated stood at 49.6 percent, but as WRAL reported that day, “vaccination rates are starting to drag both in North Carolina and nationwide. North Carolina’s percentage of fully vaccinated adults has crept up by only a percentage point or so each week recently.”

Well, what happened to Cooper’s other metrics? They’re no longer useful for their actual purpose. For example, consider test percent positivity (and the Cooper administration has had their thumbs pressing hard on that scale by far, far exceeding the scientific consensus of the threshold dividing positive vs. false positive test results):

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