On masks and more, what Missouri Gov. Mike Parson says about COVID-19 is just not true
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson keeps saying things about the global coronavirus pandemic that are just not true.
More than once, he has said that the current guidance on wearing a mask is this: “It’s up to the individual what they want to do.”
No, it isn’t. The current CDC guidance is that if you have to be in close contact with others in places where social distancing is not possible, you should absolutely wear one, to protect them in case you have it yourself and are asymptomatic. This is no substitute for social distancing, the guidance stresses, but is a necessary additional measure.
At a news conference last week, Dr. Rex Archer, Kansas City’s health director, was wearing a mask himself when he explained that doing so is key to stopping the spread: “That’s why wearing the mask is important. It’s not just to protect you. The main reason we want people to wear masks is so that if you have this” and don’t know it, “you’re not spreading it to other people.” The prospect of fatally infecting others is nothing to be cavalier about.
Yet when Parson was asked if he’d wear one, he not only said no but behaved as if the question was an affront to his manhood. Maybe ask British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who boasted that he intended to keep right on shaking hands with COVID-19 patients, how being too tough to take precautions worked out. He is still recuperating after contracting the coronavirus and spending three nights in intensive care in a London hospital.
Parson has consistently set expectations based on hopes and dreams rather than on science.
“The truth is,” he said last week, “this virus is going to be around several more months.”
No, the truth is it will be around a lot longer than that. “We’re going to have to close down at least three or four times over the next 24 months if we do this well,” Archer said.
And that’s a big if.
Some of the governor’s statements are merely a self-serving rewrite of recent history. “The numbers were projected to be so much worse in Missouri,” he said, “had we not taken fast and decisive action to implement social distancing.” Good one, sir.
The numbers often cited by the White House Task Force were projected to be so much worse everywhere, even in New York. That model, out of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, initially said 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could die of COVID-19 by August. That’s now been revised to about 60,300 in the first wave of infections — more Americans than there are names on the memorial wall honoring those we lost in Vietnam.
As for “fast and decisive action,” Parson was among the last governors in the country to issue a shutdown order, and when he finally did, put out one so porous as to be almost meaningless. The number of cases and deaths in Missouri is still climbing: On Sunday, the tally of COVID-19 cases in Missouri jumped by more than 100, to 5,667 cases, and the total deaths reached 176. To speak as if the crisis is mostly behind us now is incorrect and irresponsible.
“We face a doleful future,” Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, a former president of the National Academy of Medicine, told The New York Times. A report surveying more than 20 top scientists said Fineberg “and others foresaw an unhappy population trapped indoors for months, with the most vulnerable possibly quarantined for far longer. They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.”
Though so much depends on scientific breakthroughs, a lot does depend on us: “If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.”
You won’t hear a hint of a whisper of even that possibility from Parson, of course.
Ever so briefly, good sense did poke its little head up: Last week, on his Facebook page and in interviews, Parson said that when we have 40,000 to 50,000 coronavirus tests a week in Missouri, we’ll be in a position to gradually and carefully reopen non-essential businesses. This was in keeping with White House guidance, and for that matter, all known public health advice.
“Once testing is where it needs to be,” he said last Wednesday, “then we can open the state back up.” On Thursday, he said data from that testing would allow us to look at the situation and make informed decisions. Excellent.
But then, on Friday, in answer to a question about what exactly he thought could reopen right away on May 4, after the current statewide stay-at-home order expires, he said well, just about everything, expressing hope that most businesses would open.
What happened to gradually, carefully, and once there’s widespread testing that we do not now have?
Parson insists that such testing is right around the corner, saying that he expects testing to jump up significantly in the near future. Members of Congress have told him, he said, that “testing and availability are coming more and more online by the end of the month, and when we do that we’ll be able to move forward much more quicklier.”
We keep hearing that, and hopefully at some point it will be true.
But by May 4?
Last Thursday, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said that if Missouri needs 40,000 tests a week to reopen safely, we have a long way to go. “Right now the state of Missouri has 3,000. So we’re about 37,000 short right now in Missouri to match our testing goal.”
To keep the contagion from roaring back, Archer said, everyone exposed to someone who’s tested positive would need to be quarantined and tested at least twice. “We don’t have that capacity,” he said. Not even close.
In an interview last week with Springfield’s KOLR10, Parson threw some more fairy dust in the air: “Hopefully, the vaccine comes out before the fall” so we can all “get back to a little bit of (what) we consider normal life. I want to get them people back out.”
Everyone does. But no one in a position to know has ever said an effective vaccine might be ready before fall, so why say something so fanciful? If we’re lucky, we could have one in a year to 18 months. Even then, ramping up production of enough to vaccinate everyone will be a major hurdle.
While Missourians continue to die of COVID-19, our governor continues to whistle and talk nonsense. He’s distinguishing himself in his handling of this crisis, but not in a good way.