Is Kansas City ready for the coronavirus? Hopefully, but this is not a PR exercise

Why even hold a news conference if the plan is to say as little as possible? Happy talk is no vaccination against the coronavirus, and vague answers inspire more concern than confidence.

The only really useful suggestion at Tuesday’s coronavirus news conference at City Hall in Kansas City was that we should all stop shaking hands for now. Until further notice, an elbow bump or bow is safer.

Beyond that, local officials said everything is under control, but were vague when asked for details. The incontrovertible thing they suggested is that there is no reason to panic. (There are no known cases here yet, though officials rightly say that’s only a matter of time.)

But while it’s certainly true that panic is dangerous, evasiveness causes rather than allays it.

Kansas City Health Department Director, Dr. Rex Archer, seemed to downplay the importance of testing and talked around several questions about it at the news conference. Across the country, delays in testing for the coronavirus, or COVID-19, have been an issue.

Asked about the availability of testing here, Archer, said, “We’ve had a challenge in the U.S. with the lab testing process and some contamination. That has been corrected to my knowledge, and more and more labs will be coming online, including some commercial labs that will also be available beyond the state labs and Centers for Disease Control.”

More and more labs will be coming online, it’s true, and the lack of ready testing is a national problem that’s obviously not in any way the fault of Kansas City officials.

But Archer seemed to say that testing isn’t that important.

“In a sense, because there’s no specific treatment for this different from influenza, you could actually make the argument that for the individual, other than the curiosity of knowing what you have, it doesn’t really change the outcome.”

You could make that argument, but should you? Knowing how seriously to self-quarantine so as not to infect others is a little more than mere “curiosity.”

“Once we start seeing lots of cases in Kansas City,” Archer continued, “what I want to remind you, four out of five folks will be able to heal easily at home. They shouldn’t even have to call their doctor because you’ll heal without that. You don’t have to overburden the system. The challenge is for those that are getting iller, then they’ll be coming in regardless of whether they think they have corona or not, and we’ll be giving the same types of treatment to an individual whether they have influenza or coronavirus.”

Is he really telling us to wait until we’re seriously ill to call a doctor? Health officials elsewhere have cautioned those with symptoms to call their primary care doctors to talk about both treatment and testing rather than risk infecting others by visiting an emergency room.

Testing, Archer said at the news conference, “helps us from a public health standpoint in the early stages to do contact tracing, try to figure out where the exposure is occurring, so yes, we want lab capacity to improve, but it’s not a main game-breaker right now for us.”

In the Seattle area, where 10 people have died, testing and better guidelines for testing from the CDC could have contained the outbreak that went undetected for weeks.

Erica Carney, the medical director of Kansas City’s Emergency Medical Services, said that since test results are not immediately available anyway, “if there is a high concern for exposure, we have to go forward with the proper measures without an answer, without a test anyways because it takes time for us to get that answer.”

At a White House briefing, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said that by the end of this week, close to a million tests could be performed in the U.S., though some public health officials were skeptical that anything like that number might be possible. There’s no question, though, that testing is vital.

Two Black & Veatch employees in the Kansas City area are “self-isolating” after possible exposure to the virus.

“Across the metro area, across the U.S., we have a lot of people that we are monitoring” through an app that records symptoms, Archer said. “If those start to change, their category changes to what we call a person under investigation. At that point, then we will go out and do the lab testing to determine whether or not they might have this disease. The problem, as mentioned, is that it may still take several days before we get those results back, but we have to presume that might be what they’ve got. We’re already keeping them basically under a kind of quarantine situation.”

How many people in the area have been tested or are being monitored and how many beyond the two Black & Veatch employees are “basically under a kind of quarantine situation” are among our unanswered questions. The Johnson County Department of Health and Environment has said it’s monitoring about 30 people.

At the news conference, Archer was asked when local health care providers would be getting kits to do the testing here instead of sending off samples to the state or CDC.

“I think it will be within not too many weeks.” Fair enough; no one knows for sure.

We do know that some 3,100 people have died so far as a result of the coronavirus, 11 of them in the U.S. The World Health Organization has said that the global mortality rate from it is 3.4%, compared to 0.1% from the flu.

“One of the things we do know is that we’re prepared,” said Mayor Quinton Lucas. As prepared as possible, hopefully. But as a former Kansas City mayor, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, has said, the country as a whole is “woefully unprepared.”

Our hands have never been cleaner, and we’re all learning to open doors with our elbows.

But if we aren’t getting the best information from the federal government — and we certainly aren’t — then it’s even more important to be able to trust that Kansas City officials are being completely forthcoming. This is not a PR exercise.

This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.