‘Incredibly distressing’: Local leaders break with Trump on relaxing COVID-19 efforts
President Donald Trump’s evolving rhetoric on the coronavirus and his suggestion that lockdowns across the U.S. could end within weeks elicited confusion — even ridicule — from a host of local and state officials in Kansas and Missouri Tuesday.
Trump suggested Americans could return to work and that social-distancing efforts could be scaled back by Easter, which falls on April 12. That’s more than a week before metro-wide stay-at-home orders expire. And depending on how coronavirus, or COVID-19, progresses, those could even be extended.
Asked about Trump’s proposed Easter timeline on a video conference Tuesday afternoon, Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Lee Norman was incredulous.
“Did he say what calendar year?” Norman said.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who issued the metro’s first emergency declaration and ordered residents to stay home starting Tuesday, called the president’s shifting message “incredibly distressing,” particularly because he had been “starting to recognize the crisis.”
A week ago, the White House issued guidance that group gatherings should be limited to 10, and federal officials have been urging people to stay home.
Now, Trump is shifting his focus from preventing spread of COVID-19 to averting an economic downturn, saying he would like to see American life return to normal.
Lucas, has acknowledged the “incredibly deleterious” impact to Kansas City’s economy from the stay-at-home orders that began Tuesday.
“I also know that if people die, I can’t bring them back,” Lucas said. “And so that’s why we take these sorts of steps because now from what we’re hearing from medical doctors, not just from game show hosts, is that this is the way that we can actually make some great difference in life outcomes for our community.”
There was also pushback from a staunch Trump ally, Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who dismissed the idea that restrictions put in place to slow the COVID-19 outbreak will be lifted anytime soon.
“I hope the president is right,” Parson said Tuesday of Trump’s earlier remarks, “but the reality is we are planning this much longer than two weeks here in the state of Missouri.”
Shifting messages
Trump in recent days has begun signaling he would scale back efforts to constrain the spread of the virus. That is against the advice of public health officials who argue the measures are needed to avoid increasing the number of infected and overwhelming the health care system.
He told reporters Monday that “our country wasn’t built to be shut down.” On Tuesday in a Fox News virtual town hall, he said that he “would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”
The president repeated the message in a Tuesday afternoon press briefing at the White House, saying he would like to return to normal life even sooner. But he said he would “only do it if it’s good” and that his decisions would be based on “hard facts and data.”
“Ultimately the goal is to ease the guidelines and open things up to very large sections of our country as we near the end of our historic battle with the invisible enemy,” Trump said.
His concerns about a financial downturn — evidenced by the jagged decline of stock indexes over the last month — are on the minds of local officials who are walking a tightrope between public health and economic collapse. They also came as the U.S. saw its biggest jump yet in the death toll from the virus, with 609 American deaths attributed to COVID-19 since the outbreak began.
In Missouri, six people have died because of COVID-19, including a 30-year-old woman from St. Louis. In Kansas, two people have died.
In an interview Tuesday, Lucas said he worried that the president’s messaging would give license to people who might be inclined to defy local orders meant to prevent the spread of the virus.
“The president’s statements matter. People listen to them. He has a megaphone,” Lucas said. “Young people may say, ‘Well heck, the president doesn’t think it’s a big deal, so why should I?’ And I think that is an incredible problem. I think there are a lot of other folks that are just looking for an opportunity to say, ‘See, this is overblown. This is just some giant conspiracy by lots of people.’”
Even as local officials have essentially shuttered businesses, they have voiced remorse for the workers who will be affected and sought to make programs available to them.
Business leaders want to see a balance between public and economic health. But Joe Reardon, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce said most understand the importance of limiting public movement — and back aggressive efforts to slow the spread of the virus.
“I think there’s a general belief that this is the best way to get back to business for the long run,” he said of the region’s stay-at home-order. “We’re hearing from those experts that if you try to go back too quickly that you could cause a more sustained impact.”
A staunch ally
Perhaps no official in the region has echoed Trump more than Parson.
On March 12, for example, he minimized the government’s role in dealing with COVID-19, telling KMOX-AM in St. Louis “It’s not going to come down to the government to be able to fix this, it’s just gonna come to... it’s a virus, it’s a virus like anything else.”
The same day, Trump downplayed the risk of continuing to hold large campaign rallies around the country.
On March 13, both Parson and Trump declared states of emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the state’s urban centers issuing mandatory stay-at-home restrictions, roughly 40 percent of Missouri’s residents are under local orders to remain in their homes except for essential activities, such as going to the grocery store.
Parson has been contacted over the last week by local officials, public health authorities and doctors urging him to extend the stay-at-home orders statewide to help stave off the spread of COVID-19 and depletion of the state’s available hospital beds, ventilators and precious personal protection equipment.
Lucas said Parson’s resistance to a statewide order shows a “complete lack of consistency” over state vs. local control.
“Dating back to Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, it has nothing to do with state control or local control; it has everything to do with the fact that we disagree with what you’re doing,” Lucas said, “and I think that this situation makes clear that that is the case.”
He added: “When it comes to the spread of a global pandemic, we’ve largely been told in cities, ‘Hey it’s’ all on you. Good luck and we don’t want to get in the way.’ But if it comes down to something as simple as, ‘Hey, we want to know how our police are utilized,’ it actually is something that is state-controlled — or we want to control how much we can pay people in our city.”
So far Parson has rejected those calls, echoing Trump’s message that it could do too much damage to the state’s economy.
“When you start talking about shutting the state down for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, the effect that has on everyday people is tremendous,” Parson said on Monday. “It means businesses will close. People will lose their jobs. The economy will be in worse shape than ever.”
On Tuesday, however, he broke with the president and emphasized the need to continue social distancing as reflected in his recent order banning gatherings of more than 10 people.
“It’s gonna take people abiding by the laws and abiding by the orders to get to where we can move on from this,” he said, later adding: “It is crucial to follow the order on social distancing as much as possible. If it is not absolutely necessary to go out, stay at home. Whether you personally think so or not, this is serious. And you’re putting not only our own health in jeopardy, but the health of everyone around you in jeopardy.”
‘No playbook for this’
Tim Cowden, president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council, on Tuesday said business and government leaders are “walking a fine line” between economic and public health. He said the pandemic presents unprecedented challenges for every single individual, government official and business leader.
“There’s no playbook for this,” Cowden said. “Every government is working through the best that they can to meet the challenges that all of us are confronted by.”
Late last week, Cowden and Reardon urged Parson by letter to order restaurants across the state to limit their service to drive-thru, pickup and delivery orders only and bar gatherings of more than 10.
“The success of our efforts to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and shorten the unprecedented disruption of our economy depends on the public receiving clear and consistent guidance from our leadership about the role each individual must play,” they wrote.
Norman dismissed calls to back off the nation’s social distancing strategy.
“Well, I don’t agree,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
Norman instead emphasized the importance of a balanced approach. He said the Kelly administration wants to preserve the economy and deploy a “graded response” to the public health threat.
“It doesn’t do any good to overshoot the mark and kill the patient,” Norman said. “Really, what you want to do is to cure the disease.”
U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, a Great Bend physician closely aligned with Trump, said it was unlikely that Kansans could expect for the restrictions on their daily activities to end as soon as the president and many business owners would like.
“I’m always a doctor first and my No. 1 concern is the health and well-being of Kansans, so unless the numbers look better by then we’ll probably have to maintain our social distancing,” said Marshall, a candidate for U.S. Senate.
“It really depends on where the data is then... I’m going going to err on the side of health and safety,” he added.
Kansas’s largest city, Wichita, will come under a stay-at-home order on Wednesday, a day after the Kansas City metro area and Lawrence went into lockdown.
Sedgwick County health officer Garold Minns had said over the weekend the county had more time to figure out how to impose restrictions while doing the least damage to the economy. He suggested as recently as Sunday that the county could wait to issue an order until the county saw an uptick in the number of patients admitted to ICUs.
Minns told reporters on Sunday that he didn’t have a number for how many patients would need to be hospitalized with COVID-19 before he recommended a stay-at-home order. He said “a lot of admissions” to intensive care units is “probably when we’re going to have to tighten down,” but added that “this virus doesn’t treat most people too badly.”
“If I had my preference, we would isolate everyone totally and shut the city down and then wait for a vaccine to appear in a year and a half,” Minns said Sunday. “But I realize the consequences of doing that would be incredibly worse than the disease. The economic and political and social consequences of doing that would be worse than just letting everyone get the disease.”
But by Tuesday, Minns had signed a stay-at-home order, effective at midnight.
The Star’s Bryan Lowry contributed to this report from Washington, D.C. The Wichita Eagle’s Jason Tidd contributed reporting
