Joan Connell, Lead, NDMA Physician Advocacy Group

We, as North Dakota Physicians, support and thank Governor Burgum for his recent executive orders mandating masks, restricting large crowds, and limiting restaurant hours/capacity. We are grateful to Governor Burgum for taking this step to protect North Dakotans’ lives in a way that optimizes livelihoods under the circumstances of significant COVID case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths in our state. We recognize that these classic mitigation strategies, along with isolation of positive cases and quarantining of close contacts, as well as frequent handwashing and disinfecting surfaces, are the only viable options for significantly reducing the burden of COVID disease in our state while we await a successful vaccine. We thank North Dakotans for their compliance with these orders. We know that this may require significant sacrifices on the part of many of you. Please know that you are helping us, your healthcare providers and public health workers, to do our best to keep us all safe, while preserving our ability to continue caring for you when needed in our hospitals and clinics.

Know that this is not something that we need to bear forever. We are hopeful that if we all step up to make these sacrifices together now, we can hope for a flattening of the curve within 2 incubation cycles (or about 4 weeks). This will buy us precious time to deploy forthcoming better therapies, and efficacious vaccines, both of which appear to be close at hand.

In this season of Thanksgiving, we thank our Governor for taking these much-needed steps, and we thank you for doing your part with us to fight this historic pandemic.

Stay Healthy, North Dakotans!

(This letter was co-signed by numerous physicians who are part of the group.)