Is Kansas City complying with COVID-19 mask order? Here’s what citizens are saying

Kansas City health officials are taking the COVID-19 mask order deadly seriously. And so are thousands of citizens who are helping the city enforce it.

While Kansas City’s health director, Rex Archer, gives the city a lowly C- for its contact tracing efforts — a function of the lack of manpower and money — he gives the health department a B+ for its response to citizen reports of noncompliance with coronavirus restrictions in area businesses.

As of last week, Archer said, the city had fielded about 2,500 citizen complaints.

Of those cases, only 2% are considered open, he says, meaning nearly all complaints have been dealt with by the city.

“Absolutely. We take this very seriously,” Archer told The Star Editorial Board. “If you don’t follow up on the wearing of masks, particularly with the indoor environments and exposure, then yeah, you won’t get the level of compliance you need, and we won’t slow this thing down enough.”

Roughly 35% of the complaints resulted in a field investigation; 33% were resolved via phone or email; and 30% were, in fact, not violations.

Two restaurants with disturbing reports

In a spot check by The Star of citizen complaints from Aug. 14, most involved the failure of business employees to wear masks and require customers to do the same.

But disturbingly, two citizen reports the week of Aug. 10 involved separate restaurants where someone reported an employee had served customers in the days between getting tested for COVID-19 and receiving a positive diagnosis. There was no indication of testing or quarantining other employees in either case.

While most of the restaurant industry has gone to great lengths to be safe, the lag time between coronavirus tests and results leaves a gaping hole for infections to get through. Archer said it has sometimes taken five to nine days to get test results.

It also worries Archer that many businesses don’t provide paid sick- or quarantine-leave, which puts cash-starved employees in a position of choosing whether to report for work while possibly contagious.

“That’s a huge concern,” Archer said. “Until we fix testing as a nation, until we fix paid sick and quarantine leave as a nation, we’re going to have these ethical dilemmas.”

Less troubling, but still problematic, is the fact that a whopping 30% of citizen complaints called in to the city via 311 or emailed to Environmental.Health@kcmo.org have been unfounded. Either because of confusion about the city’s rules, or perhaps overzealousness, nearly a third of complaints simply aren’t valid.

“That 30% bothers us a little bit,” Archer said.

Still, a bigger bugaboo is misinformation and downright cantankerousness that leads some business operators and customers to ignore the city’s mandate. In fact, Archer said Wednesday that one business owner has so doggedly refused to wear masks, or require customers to, that the city had begun proceedings to withdraw the building’s occupancy permit, which would force it to close. Later that day, the health department closed down the U-Haul at 11827 Blue Ridge Boulevard for exactly that. Officials confirmed it was the business Archer was referring to.

“We are in the process of getting ready to remove their occupancy (permit) so they will no longer be even allowed to be in that facility,” Archer said. “Hopefully, once that goes through, they will decide to comply. But that’s their choice. They can’t decide that they don’t have to follow the law.”

In cases where a business serves food or alcohol the city could also lift food and alcohol licenses. Such moves are faster and more effective than going to court, he notes.

“Being forced to vacate the premises is a lot bigger than a fine,” Archer adds.

Contact tracing can help trace outbreaks

Meanwhile, the job of contact tracing — trying to follow a reported infection or cluster back to its source in order to minimize further spread — will only get bigger as people continue to move about the city and cases increase in number. Thankfully, as Mayor Quinton Lucas performed his own spot checks on area night spots, the city this week essentially doubled its ability to trace outbreaks, adding 20 new workers for the task. More are in the offing, all thanks in large part to federal funding flowing through Jackson and Clay counties.

But no amount of government is going to get us through this. It’s going to take all of us working together.

Saying the public input on COVID-19 violations is “kind of like having a great neighborhood watch in every community,” Archer says the city couldn’t enforce its COVID restrictions without a caring, wary citizenry. He said he hears through the grapevine that employees are grateful for the health department’s responsiveness to complaints about thoughtless employers putting them and their customers at risk. And he says enforcement has the city’s high-risk populations — those 60 and over and those with underlying medical conditions — “feeling safer to go out because they know that the mask itself is not half as effective unless all parties are wearing the mask.”

Rex Archer isn’t a cop. He’s a doctor, and an affable sort at that. When asked why he gives his department only a B+ when its complaint clearance rate is 98%, he jokes, “I’m a hard grader.”

But the man has been thrust by this pandemic into the unenviable position of trying to convince us to stay safe and keep our neighbors safe, sometimes against our natural inclinations.

The least we can do is follow doctor’s orders.

This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.