As he prepares to begin his second four-year term, Gov. Roy Cooper looks forward to dealing with issues like job growth, education funding and health care access rather than coronavirus, which has dominated the agenda for most of the past year.
"All of those issues are still important, but they have a very different backdrop with this global pandemic," Cooper said Wednesday in an interview with WRAL News.
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The virus has infected more than 450,000 people in North Carolina since March. Although about 75 percent of them have since recovered, nearly 6,000 people have died, and the state has seen record numbers of people hospitalized with the virus for much of the past three weeks.
Cooper said he has continually drawn on the state's scientific brainpower to respond to the crisis, putting various restrictions in place in an attempt to limit the virus' spread, starting with closing schools and shutting down large swaths of the economy for much of the spring and summer. As businesses were allowed to reopen, capacity limits and a mask mandate were put in place, and a nightly curfew went into effect in mid-December.
"These are uncharted waters we are navigating," he said, noting that he also negotiated with affected businesses at each juncture to "cause the least economic pain."
Still, many industries challenged his decisions in court, as well as and in the court of public opinion, staging rallies to build pressure on the governor to ease restrictions.
"It's been a learning process for all of us, including me, but I've felt confident about the decisions that we've made because we've made them for the right reasons," he said. "We've looked at people who are experts and have looked at the data and have made sound decisions, I think, putting health and safety first."
But the virus continues to rage across the state, with 48 of the 100 counties considered "red zones," with a critical level of spread. Some of that is due to lack of compliance, with people openly flouting the mask mandate and limits on the size of indoor and outdoor gatherings.
During a Tuesday news conference, the governor asked cities and counties to enact ordinances levying civil penalties on people who don't abide by pandemic-related restrictions. Law enforcement can only issue misdemeanor citations for any violations of the executive orders in place.
"We have put these protocols in place to protect people," Cooper said. "What we're doing now is working hard to enforce those protocols. We believe that, if people, for the most part, would abide by those protocols, we could get our numbers down."
He said he doesn't want to reimpose the shutdown orders from early in the pandemic because of the economic toll, but he is quick to remind people that option is still available if North Carolina's trend lines don't improve.
"I'll do whatever is necessary to protect the health of North Carolinians," he said.
Now, he is eager to get coronavirus vaccine distributed statewide and have people inoculated against the virus as quickly as possible. And he revels in the fact that North Carolina researchers have played key roles in studying the virus and developing cures for it.
"It's amazing what kind of achievements we can have when we all work together," he said.
Working together will be key to any success Cooper might see in his second term. His first four years in office have been marked by frequent clashes with the Republican-controlled General Assembly – he issued 53 vetoes during that time, after only 35 were issued by other governors over the preceding two decades.
"We owe them hard work in trying to find consensus," he said of voters that returned both him and GOP legislative majorities to office.
The pandemic has spotlighted the need for more spending on schools, broadband and health care statewide, he said.
"All of us are going to be approaching it in a new way," he said of post-pandemic governing. "We made some accomplishments together last term. We need a lot more this time. I'm committed to trying to work with them for a better North Carolina."