KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Missouri Gov. Mike Parson remains steadfast in his decision to reopen businesses May 4 after the current stay-at-home order expires and promised to release preliminary guidelines by Monday for reopening the economy.
The guidelines, which Parson alluded to Thursday during his daily COVID-19 briefing, will include recommendations for when restaurants, bars, salons, barber shops and big box stores should open.
Whenever Missourians go back to work en masse, health officials anticipate a new spike in COVID-19 cases but Parson believes it’s a necessary choice.
“I think we’re going to be much more prepared for that second wave when it comes, if it comes,” Parson said.
He said he has to balance that risk with the desire to get Missouri residents back to work.
“We have to open up the economy,” he said.
That includes using federal money to expand child care services in conjunction with the return to work.
“We’re going to look at that from whatever it takes to get people back into the workforce,” Parson said. “We want to have enough tools in the toolbox to get people back to work and get the economy going.”
Another part of that calculus is an expansion of Missouri’s testing capability, which now allows health officials to test all workers at a given facility — meat-packing plants and nursing homes were specifically mentioned.
“Could we really go into there to a plant, a full-size plant, and do full-scale testing? The answer is yes,” Parson said.
In fact, Health and Senior Services Director Dr. Randall Williams said there are plans to do just that at facilities in Moniteau and Saline counties during the next few days with a rapid-testing procedure.
“One of the things that we’re transitioning to is that we now have the testing capability to do what we couldn’t do three or four weeks ago,” Parson said.
The state health department also plans to perform 3,000 tests at a meat-packing facility in Missouri beginning Friday, though Williams didn’t say where that plant was located.
Both symptomatic and asymptomatic workers will be tested, allowing for greater certainty in controlling the COVID-19 spread at the locations where the mass- or rapid-testing strategies are deployed.
As far as nursing homes, “the first thing is prevention,” Williams said.
Missouri has yet to draw down more than $90 million in federal funding from the supplemental budget to nursing homes, but the governor’s office said the wheels are in motion and that should happen within the next few weeks to help provide financial assistance to long-term care facilities.
The state plans to allocate the money to stockpiling the necessary personal protective equipment for workers at nursing homes and ensuring they have the ability to monitor and test for a potential COVID-19 outbreak, if needed.
“The last thing to open will probably be long-term care facilities, because so much of our morbidity and mortality is coming from those facilities,” Williams said.
Parson stressed that the state’s stay-at-home supersedes local shutdown orders.
While local health officials can enact stricter measures, as Kansas City and Jackson County have done with stay-at-home order extended through May 15, county and city health departments are not permitted to reopen businesses before the statewide order expires.
“I think what we have to do at the state level is give somewhat broad guidelines for the local level,” Parson said.
When Missouri announces its plan for reopening the economy Friday, Parson said it will include some latitude for local health departments to make their own decisions about public swimming pools and summer sports leagues among other locations and activities.
It doesn’t sound like Parson plans to coordinate with officials from surrounding states as some have done.
Parson said he’s relying on data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior services and is primarily concerned with his own state.
“I need to have a system in place and a model in place that deals with just Missouri,” he said, indicating that he isn’t concerned about what Kansas or Illinois are doing.
Parson applauded the efforts of the Department of Labor in processing unemployment claims, noting that Missouri — while overwhelmed, like most states right now — hasn’t experienced delays and hiccups on the scale other states, including Kansas, are seeing.
“I think they’re doing a much better job over there,” Parson said. “I’m going to say they’ve been doing a good job since day one, considering the volume. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Workers from other departments continue to be diverted to the unemployment effort, manning call centers, handling emails and process requests “24 hours a day,” Parson said.
He said the state processed 115,000 claims last week.
“It’s a matter of volume and getting people through the system, but we want to process and get that money out as soon as possible,” Parson said.
As for concerns about lost revenue and what that means for the state budget moving forward, Parson said Missouri hasn’t been forced to furlough workers or cut salaries yet, but he didn’t rule out the possibility down the road.
“You’re just going to have to tighten the belt,” Parson said. “We’re going to have to go in with the legislature and look at those programs.”
He noted that in times of prosperity, the state often undertakes new tasks or programs, “but a lot of great things that government was never intended to do,” Parson said.
He also projected a strong rebound in the third and fourth quarters from a tax revenue standpoint, assuming businesses return to work.
Parson hopes a second round of federal stimulus money could help Missouri backfill some of the gaps created by mounting unemployment claims, which would aid in balancing the fiscal budget next year.
But Parson also rankled at the notion that the federal government should bail out states on the verge of bankruptcy, primarily due to swollen unemployment ranks. That includes nearly 400,000 new unemployment claims in Missouri during the last five weeks, or more than 6% of the state’s workforce.
“If the question is, do I believe the federal government should bail the states out? I do not …,” he said. “If you put yourself in that bad of position, that’s the state’s responsibility. It’s totally not fair to the states that do do a good job managing their money.”
He said he would prefer a federal infrastructure bill to a blank check for individual states to allocate as they see fit.
