Year of COVID-19 revealed distinct, troubling gaps in Kansas City. We must fix them

One year ago, a mysterious virus moved from fiction to fact.

We whispered: Have you heard about this new disease? Might be dangerous. They’re calling it COVID-19.

Since those horrific early days, we’ve learned a lot about how this coronavirus works, how it’s transmitted, how to fight it in the hospital, how to prevent it. We’ve also learned COVID-19 is a relentless killer, claiming more than half a million of our friends and neighbors, including more than 2,000 in the Kansas City area.

Almost 29 million people have caught the disease. Some may suffer for years.

We’ve seen examples of heroism, large and small. Health care workers. Nursing home staff. Those who stock grocery store shelves and prepare our food. Police officers, firefighters and soldiers. Teachers. Students. Anyone who stayed on the job, risking their lives to make sure the rest of us could eat, or have a drink of water, or keep the lights on, deserves our thanks.

In a larger sense, though, we clearly failed each other during the Year of COVID-19. Virtually every strategy to reduce the impact of the virus became bitter grist for the political mill. Fingers were pointed, claims were made, masks were worn and denounced. And still people died.

The end of this grim story is not here, but it is close. Vaccines are going into arms, albeit at a slower rate than anyone would like. The rate of infection has dropped, although it remains slightly higher than a year ago, when schools and stadiums and churches and businesses shut their doors.

Now is not the time to relax. But it is time to take stock, and to study, and to learn. What went right? What went wrong? Most important: How should we respond the next time this happens?

COVID-19 has been an unspeakable tragedy. But the disaster will be infinitely worse if we dismiss the pandemic as a rare black swan event and go back to business as usual. We have to be better.

Overreaction to ‘tyranny’ becomes anarchy

Local, state and national leaders are still engaged in a furious argument over who gets to make the decisions in a pandemic. Mask mandates? Closed schools and businesses? Inoculation strategies? Health care oversight?

Mayors, governors, lawmakers, even the president fought for months over who was in charge. This has to end. Endless political bickering hampered the response to COVID-19, and is still a problem.

Policymakers must establish a clear line of authority for long-term emergency problems such as pandemics. The decision-maker should be answerable to the people, and legislators should have meaningful oversight.

But we cannot have a situation like that in Missouri, where local governments were handed authority for masks and closings — until lawmakers didn’t like what local officials decided and stepped in. Or in Kansas, where legislators spent weeks undermining the governor’s orders.

Conservatives said they feared unconstitutional tyranny. Their alternative turned out to be medical anarchy. A middle ground can, and must, be found.

The record is clear: The pandemic response in Kansas and Missouri, by almost every measure, was poor. The COVID-19 death rate in both states, as of last week, exceeded the death rate in California. That’s appalling.

Health care and nursing homes

The pandemic revealed distinct and troubling gaps in our health care system. Rural areas were particularly hard-hit by the lack of hospital facilities, while underserved and underinsured populations in urban areas suffered disproportionate illness and death.

The need for robust health care for everyone is more clear than ever. No one should die in a pandemic because it costs too much to live.

The underfunding of local health departments must come to an end. Testing and tracing became a sad joke within a few months of the start of the pandemic. Authorities must have better, real-time information to make good decisions.

The region also needs more aggressive oversight of nursing homes — and a place, and a strategy, for relocating residents when a deadly virus hits.

These reforms would not be as difficult as they seem. The United States spent billions to support vaccine research, and inoculations were available faster than almost anyone imagined. We can fix these problems if we decide to.

The state-based distribution system for vaccines has been marked in our region by bad planning and uneven access. Both Missouri and Kansas need better plans for next time, and should start working on them now.

School closings not a simple issue

Closing in-person learning in schools, from kindergarten through college, remains one of the most vexing issues to emerge from the Year of COVID-19.

We supported those closings when they were first ordered. We now know the issue is more complicated than it seemed at the time.

Remote learning is not an acceptable substitute for classroom teaching, despite the heroic efforts of teachers and students to make it work. We lack uniform access to digital learning. And the dining room table is not the same thing as a desk in Room 203.

At the same time, the risk to teachers and students in a pandemic environment is not zero. That’s why we must work to make classrooms permanently safer, with adequate ventilation, distancing and vaccinations for teachers who want them. That will cost money.

We must also study and understand the long-term impact of 18 months of interrupted learning on students, particularly those in earlier grades. Urban districts may have suffered more than others, and that should be investigated and remedied.

COVID-19 has shown us the importance of schools. We should not ignore that lesson.

Essential businesses and subsidies

Remember when everyone was told to stay home, except for essential workers in essential businesses?

It turns out no one knew exactly what an “essential” business or worker looked like. That led to loopholes, challenges, exceptions, confusion and frustration. Some disaffected business owners tried to force a recall of Mayor Quinton Lucas.

Enforcement was haphazard. Some complained, justifiably, that smaller retail shops were locked while big retailers stayed open. It was a mess.

That must change. The cities in the region, or the state or Washington, D.C., should specifically define essential businesses and workers. And employees required to stay on the job in a pandemic should get automatic additional payments from the government for their willingness to work for the rest of us.

Businesses that aren’t essential — those that must close for the common good — should also be protected. The various coronavirus relief bills that have passed, and the one now before Congress, provide some of that relief. All are important.

We’ve learned the nature of work is changing, in ways that cities and states are only starting to understand. It’s clear a heavy reliance on property and sales taxes is a problem in a pandemic, when there’s less spending and businesses sit empty.

Kansas City’s earnings tax will take a major hit this year. The city should begin an immediate study of its tax structure in light of the COVID-19 disruption.

The problems with the unemployment system in Kansas are well known, but no less critical. Missouri has also struggled with unemployment fraud and excessive payments to some claimants. Both states must fix these technological failures before the next emergency.

Efforts to set aside funds for emergency housing and rent relief should increase.

Broadly, the pandemic has revealed cracks in our public infrastructure, top to bottom. Politicians in both parties must recommit to making government work when it’s needed most, instead of disassembling it.

Sports, churches, policing adapt

When the pandemic first arrived, counties in the Kansas City region showed admirable cooperation that made restrictions — and therefore safety — easier to get.

Predictably, that cooperation quickly melted. Mayor Lucas, Johnson County Commission Chairman Ed Eilert and other local officials should work overtime to put an emergency structure in place for the future.

What to do about sports, concerts and mass gatherings of any kind? Again, the problem is inconsistency — some high school football games were held without spectators, while the Chiefs opened their doors to limited crowds. No one knows exactly why.

Churches were concerned when their doors were closed early in the pandemic. The region must have a better understanding of the danger from mass gatherings, and then treat everyone alike.

Will policing change? Will fewer cars on the street mean more resources for violent crime detection and prevention? Kansas City set a homicide record during the Year of COVID-19, which shows the difficulty of getting people to put their guns down even in a pandemic.

Why we must act now

Political leaders should get some slack from all of us for decisions they made in the face of the coronavirus crisis. Choices were tough, and there was no manual available.

But we can’t use that excuse forever. We now know what a pandemic virus can do. We know the nation’s response was poor, one of the worst in the world. Too many people got sick and died because we weren’t ready.

Once the disaster has ended — again, we’re not there yet — we must focus, as a city, state, region and nation, on how we can be better prepared next time. COVID-19 has taken 520,000 American lives.

The next crisis may be worse.