As South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster prepared to announce the end of a coronavirus stay-at-home order, his top staff received an email from the state health department.
The message, highlighted in bold, was clear: Wait longer before allowing customers back inside restaurants, hair salons and other businesses where people will be in close contact.
Instead, McMaster pressed ahead with a plan written by the state restaurant association to resume inside dining on May 11. The guidelines made masks optional for employees and allowed more customers inside than the health agency had advised.
A few days later, the Republican governor opened the doors to salons, fitness centers and swimming pools. He did not wait to gauge the effect of the restaurant reopening on the virus, as public health officials had suggested. Like many states, South Carolina later experienced a surge in infections that forced McMaster to dial back his reopening plan.
He was hardly alone. Thousands of pages of emails provided to The Associated Press under open-records laws show that governors across the U.S. were inundated with reopening advice from a wide range of industries — from campgrounds in New Hampshire to car washes in Washington. Some governors put economic interests ahead of public health guidance, and certain businesses were allowed to write the rules that would govern their own operations.
As job losses accelerated, the pressure to reopen intensified.
“Attraction folks are on me like white on rice,” McMaster’s tourism director wrote to the head of the governor’s reopening task force, describing lobbying from amusement parks, bingo halls and other entertainment venues.
Though governors often work with business leaders to craft policy, the emails offer a new window into their decisions during a critical early juncture in the nation’s battle against the pandemic. Many governors chose to reopen before their states met all the nationally recommended health guidelines, which include a sustained downward rate of infection and robust testing and contact tracing.
“The interest in trying to reopen and restart economic activity had a much greater pull at the time … than did public health concerns or question marks about how it would go,” said Anita Cicero, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.
Many states were forced to halt or roll back their reopening plans as COVID-19 cases spiked across the country this summer, and the number of infections and deaths in the U.S. far outpaced those of any other country.
In early August, McMaster transformed his restaurant guidelines into requirements, including a mandate that all diners and employees wear masks. The governor’s spokesman, Brian Symmes, said “some restaurants weren’t doing what they needed to do.”
Symmes also defended the spring reopening, saying the governor “has a wider scope of responsibility and focus than our public health officials.”
Tensions between economic and health interests were evident in New Hampshire in a decision allowing campgrounds to open with restricted capacities.
Margaret Byrnes, executive director of the New Hampshire Municipal Association, urged Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s administration to keep campgrounds closed because of concerns they could attract visitors from areas with higher coronavirus caseloads. She also wanted cities and towe to have a greater voice on the governor’s reopening task force.
“There was a lot of business and industry representation, which is really important in the reopening process, but it needed to be balanced with some local municipal representation,” Byrnes said.
Sununu’s policy director, D.J. Bettencourt, said municipalities were represented on the task force through lawmakers who doubled as local officials. He said opening campgrounds on May 1 was “an essential aspect of ensuring housing” for some health care workers and guarding against homelessness.