KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Big 12 Tournament has been the unofficial doorway to spring for years, with fans coming from far and wide to Kansas City to cheer on their team.
But in March 2020, all that excitement ground to a halt when the COVID-19 pandemic forced conference authorities to cancel most of the tournament. That was the beginning of dozens of major events being canceled in the name of public safety.
Five years later, our perspective on almost everything has changed when it comes to large events.
I went to Jackson County Public Health to get health workers' perspectives — then and now — when it comes to keeping ourselves healthy and safe.
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Ray Dlugolecki remembers when he and his colleagues knew COVID-19 was going to be a big problem.
"We saw COVID popping up all across the country, with no known ties or connections to other cases that existed, and that is a major red flag," he said.
And he knew what was likely going to make the problem worse.
"We had no tests," Dlugolecki told me.
That meant a problem with no borders. Think of it almost like fighting a fire without the ability to contain it at any point.
When the Big 12 Tournament and other events began to shut down, Dlugolecki said people's responses changed almost overnight.
"I very distinctly remember the tone of those lines changing almost immediately from questions about protecting elderly parents or other treatments or tests to, 'This is impacting me. When is this going to be over? This is something that is interrupting my life, this needs to stop.'"
We all know now that stopping it wasn't going to be an option any time soon. Looking back, Dlugolecki called it for exactly what it was.
"COVID was a wake-up call for us,” Dlugolecki said. “It was a demonstration that the infrastructure we had in this community and the United States was inadequate. There's national [accreditation] standards that exist in this country that every public health department should be able to meet. There were only seven agencies in the state of Missouri that met those standards. We were not even close, prior to COVID."
Today, that's no longer the case. Everything has changed, even the building in Lee's Summit where the health department is now housed. It was a mass testing facility in the COVID days, but now it accommodates the department's much larger staff.
In our conversation, Dlugolecki described another post-COVID change that still represents a challenge.
"We can say we have a good understanding of this and, therefore, we can assign a risk level to this,” he said. “That is very much blurred at this point in society, unfortunately. There's so much information that's just factually inaccurate."
Dlugolecki told me he's 100% confident that if he could go back five years, he’d be able to tell his colleagues they'd be better prepared to respond to something like COVID. And that’s incredibly important moving forward.
"It's a very real probability we will see some semblance of an outbreak of a known pathogen, of a novel pathogen, in the near future," Dlugolecki said. "We have a better understanding of risk associated with respiratory conditions. We have the responsibility to not only protect ourselves but other people in our society ... an important aspect in all of that as we move forward."
Dlugolecki told me during our conversation that Jackson County Public Health is in a pivotal time now as the department waits to see how federal and state grants/funding might be impacted by the Trump and Kehoe administrations.
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