North Carolina secretary of Health and Human Services Mandy Cohen sent a letter to the head of the 2020 GOP Convention, basically saying, you want to be in Charlotte? What’s the plan?:

As we work together, it is important to have a written plan from you and your team as soon as possible for how you plan to approach the COVID-19 safety aspects of the convention. A written plan provides a necessary and valuable starting point to planning discussions with our public health teams at the county and state levels. …

We also discussed on Friday the need to plan for different levels of impact of COVID-19 so the RNC convention logistics could be tailored to the COVID-19 situation we find ourselves in at the end of August. As you know, North Carolina is now in Phase 2 of easing restrictions but this Saturday we saw our highest day of new lab confirmed COVID-19 cases in North Carolina. The status of COVID-19 infections in our state and in the Charlotte area continues to rapidly evolve, thus, it will be important to have several scenarios planned that can be deployed depending on the public health situation.

According to Politico, one senior Republican called the situation “a mess.”