Once again, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly has acted to protect her constituents, imposing a statewide stay-at-home order on Saturday in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Without nearly enough equipment or tests, not to mention ICU beds, and no vaccine or proven treatment beyond the ventilators no hospital in the country has enough of, the best we can do right now is attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. And the only way to do that is with the kind of aggressive but absolutely necessary shelter-in-place order Kelly has now given.

In a failure of leadership and failure to listen to those who know better, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, meanwhile, continues to ignore the out-and-out pleading of doctors and other public health officials pushing him to take the same action.

At a self-pitying Saturday news conference, Parson said, “To the people and the reporters that do nothing but criticize others, you don’t need to listen anymore to this briefing today.” With Missouri cases mushrooming from 106 just one week ago to 903 cases and 12 deaths as of Sunday, Governor, we can neither stop listening nor stop pushing you to save lives with more aggressive action.

Parson also quoted from Teddy Roosevelt’s speech about “the man in the arena.”

“It is not the critic who counts,” he said, “not the man or woman who points out how the strong man or woman stumbles ... The credit belongs to the man or woman who is actually in the arena.” Please be strong enough to see how this is going to end — strong enough to change course. And by all means, get into the arena in a way that gives Missourians a fighting chance against this pandemic.

After Kelly issued the order, the Republican leadership in the Kansas House said in a statement that it “will no doubt impact our families and our businesses. As members of the Legislative Coordinating Council we have a duty to carefully assess this executive order and the reasons for it” to “make sure we are on the right path.”

Predictably, Republican Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle questioned the Democratic governor’s decision.

“While I appreciate the Governor’s very difficult task, I am concerned about a ‘one size fits all’ solution to reducing the spread of COVID-19,” Wagle said in a statement. “Our state has varying economic concerns and differing population bases.” It does, but the coronavirus doesn’t care where you live, and economic concerns have got to be secondary right now.

Former Kansas GOP executive director Kris Van Meteren, whose political consulting firm has worked with former Gov. Sam Brownback and Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts, pushed Republican lawmakers to try and rescind Kelly’s order in a series of Facebook posts. “Power seized like this will never be surrendered,” he said in a post that called Kelly a “little wannabe tin-cup dictator.” On Sunday, he posted that “this glorified cold bug ... smells more and more like a contrived ‘crisis.’ “

After the Kansas Chamber endorsed the stay-at-home order, and after GOP leaders were assured that the order exempts gun stores and churches at a Sunday afternoon meeting, they did not vote to override it, but backed off and let it stand. Kansas Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning said that with the number of cases doubling every four to five days, he understood that the order was “trying to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.”

Kelly said she is trying to buy hospitals and other health care facilities time as they prepare for the peak of the coronavirus, which she said in a Friday interview with The Star Editorial Board could come in late April.

Her order would supercede any federal back-to-work order, she said.

“We’re simply not ready for what we anticipate will be the peak of this pandemic,” Kelly said at a news conference on Saturday.

She’s right to say this so plainly, and we need to take her warnings as seriously as if our lives depended on it, because they do.

In the Friday interview, she said that the lack of ventilators, personal protective equipment and testing “continues to be a major problem.”

On the federal level, “We really did get a very late, slow start out of the gate on this,” she said. “When things were popping over in Asia, and it was clear we had a potential pandemic coming, there should have been a lot going on at the federal level to increase those stockpiles so that we didn’t run out of masks, so that we didn’t run out of test kits. That’s what we should have done.”

Even now, the Trump administration’s refusal to nationalize the market for these supplies, as he could choose to do under existing law, is worsening the problem.

The president has said that’s the responsibility of each state, but as Kelly said, “This is not something each individual state can manage on their own. In fact, by taking that approach, what has happened is that because there’s a shortage, because the Defense Production Act has not really been implemented, states are competing with one another for the equipment. We’re experiencing some of that.”

One Kansas hospital’s CEO told her the hospital had put in an order for 300,000 masks, only to be told that masks that had been going for 80 cents were now $4 each.

“We’re not waiting for them,” Kelly said of federal officials, “but the reality is if they don’t get on board, it will continue to be a problem, because production has not been ramped up enough.”

“I have consistently relied on the input from my professionals,” she said, so the actions she’s taken “have not been something that I’ve just sat in my office and decided OK, now’s a good time.”

If you hear nothing else, please hear this from one of those governors who is listening to science: “The worst is yet to come,” Kelly said. “The U.S. has passed China and Italy for the most cases, and the line on the graph is still going upwards. So the surge is still ongoing, and I think will continue to go. I don’t think this is going to peak and be over in a couple of weeks.

“I think we need to be much more realistic and perhaps hope it peaks some time in late April and that it starts to come down, and we’ll have to follow that as we flatten this curve to determine when it is safe to start easing back on some of these restrictions.”

To those who still doubt the seriousness with which the public should take these stay-at-home orders, Kelly said “the first thing I would tell them, this is not overblown. This is a big deal. All of the restrictions and all of the asks we’re making of Kansans are in their best interest. They really need to do their part to mitigate this crisis and to let us get back to normal.”

“I understand how disruptive and how difficult this is for all Kansans, and for some more than others. This is a really difficult thing to have to do, but that’s the key … We have to do this. If we do not do this, people will die, and it won’t bring back our economy.”

Even those Kansans who doubt her now will thank her later, and if Parson thinks the criticism he’s getting now is unbearable, he should think about that.