Missouri working to expand COVID-19 testing, but Parson will not close schools, bars
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Tuesday said officials were expanding capabilities to test people for the new coronavirus as the number of confirmed cases in the state jumped to 15.
During a news conference in Jefferson City, Parson said state officials were working with the University of Missouri to increase testing capabilities across the state.
The state laboratory will also soon receive more COVID-19 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “pushing its capacity” to test 1,600 potential patients, Parson’s office said.
In a news release, the governor’s office noted that Washington University in St. Louis was working to increase testing capabilities and the University of Missouri Health Care was planning to implement drive-thru testing in Columbia.
Mercy Hospital has already set up drive-thru testing in St. Louis County, Parson’s office said. The news release noted that Viracor Eurofins Clinical Diagnostics, a private laboratory in Lee’s Summit, will be able to test more than 1,000 patients each day.
Parson held the news conference hours after Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly ordered the state’s K-12 schools to close for the rest of the academic year.
Asked why he has not ordered Missouri’s schools closed, Parson said he thought that decision should be made locally. He said 80% of schools in the state are currently closed, but none for the rest of the year.
“We have 540 schools in this state and a lot of those schools don’t have day care,” he said, “and a lot of those schools are the main employer for those districts.”
Parson also said he would not order restaurants and bars to close in Missouri. Governors in some other states, including Illinois and Ohio, have said restaurants and bars can’t serve dine-in customers. Parson said he would “strongly suggest” there are alternative ways of doing business and noted many businesses were already taking precautions.
“When you start going going down the road of shutting businesses down, you have to be extremely thoughtful in how you do that,” Parson told reporters, “because those are business owners, those are people working, those are paychecks that are out there.”
Parson emphasized personal responsibility amid the outbreak. He said social distancing would help prevent spread of the virus.
“Those are the things that will save lives,” he said.
Last week, Parson told KMOX, a radio station in St. Louis: “It’s not going to come down to government to be able to fix this. It’s just gonna come to... It’s a virus. It’s a virus like anything else.”
Confirmed cases
Earlier Tuesday, Parson said there have now been four confirmed cases in Greene County, four in St. Louis County, two in Cass County, one in St. Louis city and one each in Boone, Cole, Henry and Jackson counties.
The patient in Jackson County is a woman in her 80s from the eastern part of the county. The patient had not recently traveled and tested positive through a private lab, the county health department said Tuesday.
Another case in the Kansas City region was confirmed Monday: a Drexel man in self-isolation in Cass County.
Of the nearly 270 people tested for the COVID-19 virus in Missouri, more than 250 have come back negative, Parson said.
Also on Tuesday, Cerner, the global health care IT firm, told workers at the Realizations campus in south Kansas City that one of their peers had tested positive for COVID-19.
The Kansas City Health Department had not received word that any Kansas City resident had tested positive for the disease Tuesday night. It was not clear if the Cerner patient represented a new case.
By Tuesday afternoon, 18 cases of the disease had been identified across the state line in Kansas.
Nationwide, more than 5,800 cases were confirmed and 97 deaths had been reported by Tuesday afternoon, according to a database maintained by Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, there were more than 196,000 cases and 7,893 deaths.
The Star’s Jason Hancock and Mará Rose Williams contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 7:43 PM.
