‘Put on a damn mask’: After metro COVID cases top 20K, KC mayor considering next steps
During a Sunday segment on CNN, Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, said the country is in a “new phase” of the pandemic.
Birx’s interview came the same day the Kansas City metro area surpassed 20,000 confirmed infections and days after Birx spoke with a number of Midwestern mayors, including Kansas City’s Quinton Lucas, about stopping the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 155,000 people in the U.S.
On the July 27 call, Birx identified the Kansas City and St. Louis regions as “areas of rising infections, particularly asymptomatic spread for those under 30,” Lucas tweeted after the meeting.
Birx recommended the mayors consider putting in place a mask order that encompasses all public spaces where social distancing can’t be enforced, including the outdoors, reducing indoor restaurant capacity to 25% and closing bars or ending alcohol sales at 10 p.m.
While St. Louis County put in place some of her recommendations beginning Friday, no change has come to Kansas City’s current guidelines.
Lucas said he requested data on the recommendations from the White House, but is still waiting for an answer. When asked if he is considering the tighter restrictions, he said “everything is on the table in Kansas City in terms of how we keep people safer.”
“But I did take note that Dr. Birx wasn’t just scheduling a call with me and two or three other mayors just to say ‘Hi, how are you doing?’” Lucas added. “Instead it was more related to the fact that we have a phase where we can either do right by our citizens here in Kansas City and our community, or we won’t.”
Cases doubled in July. August could see same rate
On Sunday, the Kansas City metro hit a new milestone in the timeline of the pandemic as the area exceeded 20,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases. More than 320 people have died.
The largest single-day spike in infections came days earlier, with 685 new cases reported Thursday. Cases more than doubled in July, which began with about 8,300 infections.
In Kansas City and Wyandotte, Johnson and Jackson counties, at least 196,600 metro residents have tested negative as of Sunday.
“The virus is here. Transmission is high. If we don’t take steps to break the transmission cycle, then that trajectory will continue,” Johnson County’s health director, Sanmi Areola, said Monday. “We are testing more people, that’s great, but that’s not the reason why the infection rate remains high.”
He attributed the summer uptick in infection rate in part to restrictions being lifted before cases were down, as well as the lack of social distancing by some and the refusal by others to wear a mask.
“The climate now is unlike what we’ve seen in the past as a lot of politics that’s infused here, and that’s making it very difficult for people to buy into the science behind this,” Areola said. “So collectively as a country we’ve got a lot of work to do in educating people and letting public health professionals and science dictate what we do and finding a way to separate politics from this.”
He said while the mask mandate has proved helpful in combating virus spread in both Johnson County and the metro, the level of transmission is still too high.
“We just began living as if the past several months did not happened, as if we were back in 2019, as if the virus wasn’t here,” Areola said, adding that many people are still crowding restaurants and throwing house parties.
Areola recently said the next few weeks will be crucial in determining whether districts should allow students back into classrooms when the school year starts after Labor Day. He said the county would ideally report a 5% positivity rate — the percentage of positive coronavirus tests among those processed over the last 14 days — before fully reopening schools.
At a recent news conference, Lee Norman, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment secretary, said he hopes another shutdown in Kansas is avoidable.
“The governor and I have talked a lot about it, and we’re always looking at what we can do to help people make the best decision without having the more severe closures. … We really still are holding onto the hope that people will get control of their own destiny.”
Randall Williams, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, said as university students begin returning to campus in the coming weeks, “we feel very strongly we have to reverse this trend that we’re seeing in the month of July.”
Williams is seeing more community spread by young adults. Because of that, he said, the state may need to double down on contact tracing, messaging, testing and work with Missouri’s metropolitan areas.
He also noted that while a statewide mask mandate is not in place, he strongly recommends Missourians wear masks around other people.
“I do think that no matter where you live in Missouri, if you can’t social distance, you should wear a mask,” Williams said.
‘Front-line defender for mask-wearing’
An employee at a Westport bar, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job, said five employees in the past two weeks have tested positive for coronavirus at the business, which temporarily closed following the announcement.
The employee jokes that the buck has been passed from the federal government all the way down to the bar employees serving as “front-line defender for mask-wearing.”
“It would be awesome if there was more leadership from anywhere,” the worker said. “Literally anywhere. I’ll take it from somewhere other than continually passing it on to the lowest person to have to enforce.”
The employee appreciates Lucas’s current mask requirement, but said some people still enter the restaurant wearing a T-shirt over their nose when they’re told to put on a mask.
Closing at 10 p.m. and reducing capacity would “certainly be better,” the employee said of Birx’s suggestion. The bars are often busiest between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.
But, the worker added, “if we do that, we might as well close.”
‘Put on a damn mask’
As the country navigates its sixth month grappling with the pandemic, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has not issued a state-wide mask mandate as other governors have done. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed an executive order requiring face coverings in public but more than 90 counties in the state opted out of the mandate.
Masks have been required in Kansas City since late June for all employees or visitors to indoor public spaces when they are “in an area or while performing an activity which will necessarily involve close contact or proximity to co-workers or the public where six feet of separation is not feasible.”
“Frankly, we have to lead here in Kansas City,” Lucas said Monday. “Our politics appear to be different from the state of Missouri, some of our challenges appear to be exacerbated by the fact that we will not get a state-wide mask order, that some of the attention to the virus that we paid in Kansas City is not shared in other parts of Missouri.”
Lucas said he met a Chillicothe couple visiting a public space Sunday in Kansas City.
“You’re the reason I have to wear this darn thing, but I get it, I get it, and I guess it makes people safer,” Lucas recalled the man saying.
Lucas encouraged taking mask-wearing from a selfless approach.
“I think it’s a small price to pay for us to be able to get back to some level of normalcy by just saying, put on a damn mask.”
Keeping public health and safety the priority means even more aggressive testing and a focus on contact tracing in the case of an outbreak, Lucas said, adding it also might mean putting into place more mask requirements or fighting to ensure local health departments receive federal CARES Act funding.
“If we don’t do it right, then we’re looking at a phase of shut-downs and re-openings, shut-downs and re-openings ad nauseum,” Lucas said.
This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
