Normality, orthocompactness and countable paracompactness of products of GO-spaces (Q2411470)

Recall that a collection \(\mathcal V\) of open sets in a topological space \(X\) is said to be interior preserving if \(\bigcap \mathcal V'\) is open for every \(\mathcal V'\subset\mathcal V\). A topological space is said to be orthocompact if every open cover \(\mathcal U\) of \(X\) has an interior preserving open refinement \(\mathcal V\), where \(\bigcup\mathcal V=X\). \textit{Y. Hirata} et al. in [Topology Appl. 164, 45--86 (2014; Zbl 1286.54008)] asked whether orthocompact products of two GO-spaces are normal. In the paper under review the author proves that a product of a GO-space and a countably compact GO-space is normal if and only if it is orthocompact, and also shows that a normal product of a GO-space and a countably compact GO-space is countably paracompact. The author poses the question ``Does there exist a pair of GO-spaces whose product is normal but not countably paracompact?'' and asks whether the question is equivalent to the following question ``Does there exist a pair of GO-spaces whose product is normal but not orthocompact'' (Problem 3.1 in [\textit{B. M. Scott}, Topol. Proc. 5, 155--184 (1981; Zbl 0495.54019)]).