“He huffed and he puffed, and Wolf blew down our state,” one protester yelled outside of the governor’s house Saturday afternoon.
Between 100-200 people carried signs, chanted and yelled through bullhorns as they paced the Mt. Wolf street along two sides of Gov. Tom Wolf’s house. Their message was clear: They want him to open all of Pennsylvania, and they want it now.
“Open the doors as of Monday,” Joyce Cordell said as she made her way around Wolf’s house on a motorized cart. “It’s not right to keep us closed up.”
Cordell is from Hamlin, which is in Wayne County. Despite only having 105 cases and a handful of deaths, it is not one of the 24 counties that will go to yellow on May 8.
“I am here to help my daughter and all of these people get back to work,” Cordell said. “I support my fellow Americans in getting life back to some kind of normal.”
She said people need to get some sanity back in their lives and to go where they want to, when they want to.
Chris Lee, a machinist from Chambersburg, agrees.
“We want our freedom back,” Lee said. “If one business can be open, they can all be open. If Walmart can be open and not have their employees get sick, why can’t all of the businesses be open?
“Who is he to say who can’t be open?”
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The 61-year-old is unapologetically conservative and speaks her mind.
“I’m not one of those people who are going to be unhealthy because of stress, because I say what I feel,” Lee said.
And what she felt Saturday afternoon is that Wolf has mismanaged the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
She doesn’t believe healthy people should be forced to isolate or wear masks. She, like the majority attending the peaceful protest, didn’t wear a mask on the sunny day as temperatures climbed to the high 60s.
“Isolate the sick,” Lee said. “This virus is nothing more than the flu. It’s something nursing homes and hospitals deal with every year.
“Quarantining the healthy is tyranny.”
In an average year for influenza, 1 to 3 out of 1,000 people will die from flu-related complications, said Dr. Matthew Howie, York City Department of Health's medical director. For COVID-19: 1 to 3 people in 100 will die with the illness.
Lee was not alone in her thoughts.
[ The York Daily Record's coverage of coronavirus is being provided for free to our readers. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing at ydr.com/subscribe. ]
The group repeatedly chanted “open up” toward the house. Other chants informed the governor that some wouldn’t comply with a mask or vaccine order because they said it was “my body, my choice.”
Wolf was asked to come outside numerous times to answer questions, but members of his security team wouldn’t say if the governor was in the house. The only thing that was certain was two Jeeps were in his driveway.
Karen Bosco, a 62-year-old retired safety consultant from York Haven, said the governor is “killing small business.”
She believes he and other officials were unfair when they decided what businesses had to close and which ones could stay open.
“Walmart can sell stuff, but not small business,” she said while carrying a sign that clearly stated her case. “People should be able to make decisions for themselves.”
Bosco points to the Asian flu of the 1950s, when more than 100,000 people died in the United States of an example of how a pandemic was handled.
“They didn’t close everything down and quarantine everyone,” she said.
Wolf and other officials are using a variety of metrics to determine what regions and counties should move from red to yellow, which allows certain types of businesses to open and removes the stay-at-home order.
The governor gave no indication at a Friday briefing when he will announce the next group of counties making the move to yellow, or how long it will take for counties to be completely open.
Shelly Stallsmith is a trends reporter for the York Daily Record. She can be reached at mstallsmith@ydr.com or followed on Twitter at @ShelStallsmith.
Kim Strong contributed to this report.
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