Why KC has only 5 coronavirus test kits and why VP Mike Pence’s remarks aren’t helpful
The Kansas City Health Department has received all of five specimen kits to test for the coronavirus. Those came in on Thursday, along with urgent calls from local emergency rooms being inundated by requests for testing after Vice President Mike Pence’s incorrect Tuesday evening announcement that “any American can be tested.”
That isn’t the case, so “the vice president’s announcement that anybody can go and get tested wasn’t very helpful,” Dr. Rex Archer, who heads Kansas City’s health department, said in an interview. “We had multiple emergency rooms contact us about it, to get the message out that there weren’t tests.”
Also, just showing up at an ER is a bad idea, because if you do have the virus you could infect others, and if you don’t, you could get exposed to that or something else. Instead, Archer said, call ahead so that the triage nurse can help decide if you need to come in and schedule your visit to minimize exposure to others if you do.
The virus has killed some 3,200 people globally. So far, there have been no confirmed cases in either Missouri or Kansas, but officials say it’s only a matter of time. Most people will recover, but particularly older and already compromised patients are at greater risk.
So why did we get just five kits? Because the supply is still so limited nationally, that’s all the state health department allowed the city to request, Archer said. Those will be used on the first five people whose symptoms warrant testing, and then Kansas City will be able to request more.
To other questions about testing — how many people have been tested locally by sending samples off to the Centers for Disease Control before the kits arrived, for instance — Archer said, “I don’t believe we’re going to share that,” because “we’re trying not to get people fixated on the numbers.” Currently, only those ill enough to be hospitalized would be tested.
Beyond the five kits, local doctors can still send samples off for testing by the CDC or the state lab, but that takes longer.
Archer said local officials are determined to keep the public informed with constant updates, but “we’re not disclosing” details on how many samples have been sent in or how many people are sick enough to be in the “person under investigation” category of heightened monitoring. It changes nothing, Archer said, and is the wrong focus.
He said his office is monitoring students who’ve returned from study abroad programs that have been cancelled for the semester, and is giving their schools letters that they’ve completed their quarantines. How many such students? Again, he’d rather not say.
Because that would make the public nervous? “That’s part of it,” he said. But “our issue is: Are people complying?”
To other questions, such as when the kits will be more readily available, there really is no answer that wouldn’t be conjecture. “They’ll be ready when they’re ready,” he said, not being flippant but just factual.
“I was just pleased we’ve got the five,” he said.
Meanwhile, don’t visit your loved ones in a nursing home if you have any symptoms at all, since older people are much more likely to become fatally ill if infected with the coronavirus.
And whatever your political views, on this if on nothing else, don’t listen to President Donald Trump. On Wednesday night, Trump contradicted the CDC’s advice on Sean Hannity’s show, saying he had a hunch that the mortality rate announced by the World Health Organization “is really a false number,” and suggesting that people infected with the coronavirus could still go to work.
“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better.” That off-the-cuff advice is profoundly dangerous and exactly why you should listen to the health experts.
This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 2:46 PM.