No one wants another COVID-19 shutdown, but KC officials may not have any choice

No one on any side of any divide we’re aware of wants another COVID-19 shutdown. But it looks more and more like that’s where this is headed, because after never completely shutting down and then opening back up too quickly, we went right back to partying like it was 2019.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, did not schedule that recent call with Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas for her health, but for ours. Because we’re living in one of many COVID-19 red zones and breaking records for new cases day after day after day.

If something dramatic doesn’t interrupt that deadly trend immediately, Lucas and other officials are going to have no choice but to close us back down, at least partially.

At a time when local law enforcement is suddenly a federal issue but a pandemic is somehow best handled at the local level, the patchwork of responses across the area and across the country has been fatal.

And if we do have to close back down, it won’t be a case of us at the mercy of oppressive big government but us paying for our own poor decisions.

Midwesterners like to think of ourselves as bursting with common sense, but since this pandemic began, we’ve too often lacked either the judgment or the discipline to make the short-term sacrifices that would have helped our economy in the long run.

Take face coverings. As Kansas Health Director Lee Norman said recently, “Masks work. That’s been asked and answered probably since the 1500s.”

Yet just in the last couple of weeks, as part of our endorsement interviews ahead of Tuesday’s primaries, several GOP candidates for public office disputed the very latest in thinking from Elizabethan England.

We are living in a COVID-19 red zone, but for the good of our economy as well as our health have got to stop seeing this pandemic through a partisan lens.

“We are headed into unprecedented territory as the virus gains speed through our state,” Norman said on Twitter. “Now is the time to pull together and fight the virus, not each other.”

Since the beginning of this pandemic, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has failed to lead. He still too often behaves as though masks were a matter of personal preference. And while some other Republican governors have changed course as a matter of necessity, we don’t even want to think how bad it would have to get for him to follow their example.

In the absence of action on the state level, the St. Louis area has already imposed new restrictions, reducing bar hours and seating capacity in restaurants as of Friday. Columbia has also put new curfews on bars and begun requiring face masks in public places. Such measures have less impact, obviously, when surrounding localities don’t do likewise. This is why we need national intervention.

But since that’s not happening, Lucas has already said he’s considering imposing more aggressive measures, in line with what St. Louis has done. At this point, it’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t do that.

Why? The numbers. As of Sunday, Missouri had reported 51,840 cases, including 1,253 deaths. The seven-day positive test rate was 10.2%, which as Kansas City Health Director Rex Archer has said is more than twice the upper limit of where it should be.

Kansas, which last updated its numbers Friday, has at least 27,812 cases, including 358 deaths. The positive test rate was 9.4%.

Johnson County officials have rightly said they won’t be able to open schools as long as the county is seeing 100 new cases a day and a positive test rate of 9.2%, even as transmission continues to increase among younger people.

The Kansas City metropolitan area reported two more deaths on Sunday and 245 new COVID-19 cases Sunday, for a total of 20,157 cases.

At a recent news conference, Norman said he still hopes another shutdown in Kansas can be avoided: “The governor and I have talked a lot about it, and we’re always looking at what we can do to help people make the best decision without having the more severe closures. … We really still are holding onto the hope that people will get control of their own destiny.”

We are too, barely. But if we don’t turn these trends around, we’re going to have a lot more to worry about than when bars are open, or how many diners a restaurant can serve at one time.

This story was originally published August 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.