Expect a stricter COVID-19 mask order in KC. Bars, restaurants could be affected, too

A new emergency order on COVID-19 is coming by the end of this week, Kansas City officials said, and it’s likely to mandate masks in at least some outdoor as well as indoor settings.

With COVID-19 deaths in Kansas City up 60% in late July and early August, the existing order “will be strengthened” in various ways, said the city’s health director, Dr. Rex Archer.

“The biggest challenge is trying to get others near us” to follow suit, said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. He said he’ll be meeting with officials from Jackson, Wyandotte and Johnson counties later this week in an effort to do that.

The current order expires on Aug. 15, and the new order will be in effect through the end of the year, Lucas said. The new one may further limit the capacity in bars and restaurants, potentially reducing it from 50% to 25%.

The more aggressive that order is, the better, because half-measures haven’t been working, and the sooner we can put a lid on transmission, the more lives and livelihoods will be spared.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, is still scheduled to visit Missouri and Kansas this week, “to deliver aggressive, tailored, and targeted guidance” President Donald Trump has said.

But there’s no reason to wait on a cavalry that isn’t coming; we’ve known for months that the national response has been, is now and will continue to be lacking.

On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, host Margaret Brennan asked Lucas why he hasn’t taken more unilateral action, even to take advice that the White House task force has given: “I know the White House has recommended that you bring things like capacity in bars down to 25% … Why haven’t you done that?”

“One of the reasons that we have not limited it entirely yet,” Lucas said, “is because we don’t just want people going back out into the streets to celebrate. … But we are evaluating limiting both restaurants and bar capacity to avoid some of the spikes you saw in places like Houston and Phoenix and in the state of Florida.”

In his 18th & Vine neighborhood on Saturday night, the mayor said, there were probably 1,000 people out on the street.

Another problem, he said on “Face the Nation,” is that “we are surrounded by states that don’t have things like mask orders, that don’t have some of the same social distancing and restaurant rules we have. So every rule that we impose, we’re surrounded in the state of Missouri and Kansas by a number of jurisdictions that lack it. So we would like consistency largely from the White House to help make it clearer what we need to do to stop the spread here in the central United States.”

We’d like that, too, and of course it would still save lives, even at this late date.

But from this White House, dream on.

Lucas also said we need more national direction on school openings, since “we all have some grave concerns about reopening, particularly at a time you’re seeing spikes in this community,” and kids with long-term illness. He said he’s already asked Birx for guidance on that front, “and she went into some gobbledygook” that made him think she wasn’t supposed to go there at all. The president, of course, only days ago said that schools must reopen because “this thing is going away.”

Archer said he only signed off on school openings because local superintendents convinced him that students should at least have the chance to meet their teachers, so that when schools inevitably close again after a few weeks because of COVID-19, they will have some relationship with the person they’ll from then on be working with online.

“I don’t predict any schools will stay open through the fall,” he said. “And I’m really concerned about high school and middle school sports” other than track, golf, and with extreme care, maybe tennis.

“We don’t want to have to do any of this,” Lucas said again, as he has before. Just like you don’t want to hear it, and we don’t want to say it. But not doing it, hearing it or saying it would be even worse.

This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.