Whatever ‘reopening’ date KC and Missouri choose, the coronavirus danger won’t be over

If you’re not missing human interaction by now, or worried about when and how this global coronavirus pandemic will end, you’ve either been taking life-threatening chances or might already be dead, like Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.”

But amid all of the arguments about which exact day our state and local officials will say we can get back to business, here are some cautionary words from the world of science and public health: “Regardless of what’s decided,” says Dr. Rex Archer, director of Kansas City’s Health Department, “the virus isn’t going to be gone” just because we’d like that to be true.

So no matter what day next month, or the one after that, that our elected officials tell us we can inch back into life as we knew it, we should know that: 1) Their high-sign will not amount to an all-clear. 2) The danger of contracting COVID-19 will not have passed. 3) “Normal,” face-to-face interaction isn’t coming back for a long time. Or shouldn’t be, anyway.

Since the peak here isn’t expected until late April, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas just extended our local stay-at-home order from April 24 until May 15. Even some within the Trump administration have acknowledged that the hoped-for restarting date of May 1 in certain parts of the country is almost certainly wishful thinking. To pretend otherwise can only skew our expectations and deepen our disappointment when they’re not met.

Archer really is our local Tony Fauci, a dedicated public servant whose underfunded office is working under impossible circumstances with a ridiculously small staff — all of six people to do our contact tracing — while getting too little sleep. “Last week, we couldn’t even follow up on every possible case until we got caught up,” he said.

He and Lucas would no doubt patrol the streets personally if they could, like those Italian mayors yelling at people to get back in their houses instead of risking their lives to play ping-pong or get their legs waxed or their hair done. (“It’s going to be closed casket!” the mayor of Lucera shouts in one compilation of these interactions. “Who’s going to see you with your hair fixed in the coffin?”)

Because our local officials did take action and issued a stay-at-home order before there were many cases here, we are flattening the curve. In early March, we had a 265% increase in cases in one week, Archer said. Last week, we had a 12% increase.

But that absolutely does not mean that we can relax, or all of our sacrifices will have been for nothing. And because Missouri has not taken meaningful action, issuing a mostly theoretical order far too late, we’re more likely than we would have been to see several waves of reinfection and shutdowns here.

The U.S. coronavirus death toll passed 28,000 on Wednesday evening, an increase of more than 2,400 deaths in just 24 hours and the most confirmed COVID-19 deaths in our country on any one day. In Missouri, at least 147 people had died from COVID-19 as of Wednesday, and the number of cases had climbed to 4,895. We still don’t have widespread testing or enough protective gear.

“And we still haven’t seen one penny of federal dollars down at the local level,” Archer said. A previously healthy 30-year-old was one of the 12 Kansas Citians who have died of COVID-19, so we can’t assume that only older or immune-compromised people are vulnerable, either.

A draft of a national plan to “reopen” the country, which was obtained by The Washington Post, puts it this way: “Models indicate 30-day shelter in place followed by 180 day lifting of all mitigation results in large rebound curve — some level of mitigation will be needed until vaccines or broad community immunity is achieved for recovering communities.”

Any reopening must meet four conditions, that document says: A “genuinely low” incidence of infection, a “well functioning” monitoring system, a public health system that is “reacting robustly,” and enough hospital beds and staffing to scale up quickly in the event of a surge in new cases. So far, we are zero for four.

Archer said public health officials from across Missouri and Kansas have been meeting regularly — and yes, remotely — to try to reach consensus on a timeline they will then try to get local and state officials to agree to. He did not want to say what range of dates they were looking at, because it would be better if governors heard that information from health officials directly, before reading it in The Star.

Ultimately, only a vaccine or effective treatment will signal that this siege is over. And while 70 teams all over the world are working on a vaccine, we should be aware that we’ll need to be patient on that front, too. “We’ll have to prioritize vaccinations even when we get one,” Archer said, because “we don’t have the production capabilities in any way, shape or form” to vaccinate everyone all at once.

“We don’t know if one shot will be enough.” Nor do we know if reinfection is possible. “If having the disease doesn’t make you immune, then a vaccine is unlikely to work very well.”

The bottom line, Archer says, is that “this is still real early,” in what already feels to all of us like a slog. Americans are better known for inventiveness and energy than for patience and prudence, but that’s what we have to develop now. If we do that, we’ll have the best possible shot at surviving to argue over what comes next.

This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.