Virginia Governor Announces Stay-At-Home Order Extended To June 10 And People Are Not Handling It Well

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam made what many (including myself) believe to be a horrible tactical error on Monday when he announced that the state’s stay-at-home order will be extended to June 10th.

The error doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Northam added another 70 days to his state’s residents’ house arrest. It has to do with the fact that he told people that they were going to in lockdown for another 70 days.

“We are at the beginning of a period of sacrifice,” Northam said during a press conference. “This is an unprecedented and difficult time; it will be hard for people, and I understand that. But I have faith in you as Virginians. We need everyone to take this seriously and act responsibly.”

Northam added that seeing big crowds at the beach over the weekend played a part in the new order.

“You are being very, very selfish, because you’re putting all of us, especially our health care providers, at risk,” he said. “And so until today, this has been a suggestion to Virginia. Today it’s an order.”

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Even though he probably knows that it will be that long before things get back to normal, perhaps his constituents would have been better served to have him just extend the stay-at-home order until say, April 30, knowing full well that at some point between now and then he would be extending it even further into the calendar year.

Doing it that way would certainly have been more palatable and wouldn’t have caused people to lose their minds knowing they will now be forced to stay home, doing nothing, for three months.

He also put a huge dent in the hope of pretty much every other American that the pandemic will have subsided before then. Deep in our hearts most of us know that it probably won’t have, but hope is all we have at this point and we’d really like to stick with it. Couldn’t he have at least pretended?

That all being said, the cat is now out of the bag and people are having a rather rough time dealing with the potential of being housebound for another 70 days.

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