Beshear, legislators can stop Kentuckians from dying. Will they do what it takes?
Monday morning, I spent most of the morning in a car line near the University of Kentucky baseball stadium with a few hundred other people waiting to get a drive-through COVID test. My youngest, 12, had woken up feeling puny so although he’s vaccinated, with the number of breakthrough cases, it seemed like the logical thing to get him tested. (Negative! Thanks University of Kentucky, thanks Wild Health, fast and efficient as always!)
But the scene was an unbelievably depressing tableau of deja vu, all of us sitting in dread in our cars while just over the hill, the UK ICU fills with desperately sick people who may not ever leave.
“It appears that we are moving from alarming to a critical stage, and the future next couple weeks to couple months look like they’re going to be very, very rough,” Gov. Andy Beshear said later that day. “Our hospital systems are reaching capacity while patient needs continue to rise exponentially.”
Kentucky is back in the thick of the pandemic, we’re facing a lot of vexing questions about what’s going on, and all our politicians can do is file more lawsuits and quip at each other on Twitter. We get that Beshear and Senate President Robert Stivers don’t like each other, but why can’t they act like adults and get some things done that would clarify our confusion and help us stay safe?
Like who’s really in charge? The Kentucky Supreme Court slapped down Beshear over his mask mandate in a unanimous decision that seemed to make sense. If the legislature makes laws, the governor has to obey them. (Whether or not those laws overreach into Beshear’s executive authority is yet to be decided.) Beshear has talked about a special session, but Stivers says it’s too soon. Too soon for what? The GOP has been really good at criticism, but has advanced few details on the ways that they would try to handle this crisis. On Tuesday, Stivers announced a new campaign to hold vaccination clinics in his home Clay County with free prizes; better late than never, I guess.
What is going to happen with the rules on school districts and the mask mandates. The Beshear administration says the Kentucky Department of Education rule is still valid, although there are plenty who disagree. Will it just be a free for all with some districts wearing masks and others not?
And without masks, cases will climb. What exactly are Kentucky students supposed to do as more of them are quarantined? One of the General Assembly’s new laws limited the number of days that schools could be fully online to 10. That was aimed at punishing Jefferson and Fayette Counties, two blue dots that many felt stayed online for too long. Well, now there’s a bunch of rural districts — Lee, Magoffin, Knott and Jenkins Independent so far — that have had to close their doors because of too many COVID cases, but can’t offer online school because they’re limited to 10 days. Talk about unforeseen consequences.
Is Beshear going to do a statewide mask mandate for 30 days? Now that many Republicans are touting the vaccine, they’ve left small pieces of cloth over our mouths and noses as the symbol of tyranny. So what’s the answer? Vaccines without masks will just increase the kinds of breakthrough cases that are growing.
The Pfizer vaccine has now been approved by the FDA. Does that mean hordes of the unvaccinated will rush to their health clinic? Or was their objection to the “emergency” categorization just an excuse? Kentucky is still less than 50 percent vaccinated. Do we have to keep paying people to act in their best interest?
For Beshear, it would be tempting to throw up your hands and say, okay, have it your way. All you armchair epidemiologists win — no rules of any kind, every parent and school district, just do what you want. We’ve already made it clear that we don’t care about our overworked health care personnel. We don’t seem to care about children either. The majority just cares about freedom, although as singer Jason Isbell said after he required vaccinations at his shows: “If you’re dead, you don’t have any freedoms at all.”
On Monday afternoon, my colleague Alex Acquisto quoted a nurse at Ephraim McDowell Hospital who spoke at Beshear’s press conference. Eight people died in one day, he told them, as he cried. It overwhelmed the hospital’s morgue.
“We were frantically scrambling to order a refrigerator truck. Funeral homes couldn’t pick them up fast enough,” he said.
As Republican officials know but are unwilling to admit, there aren’t two sides to this debate. Vaccines and masks help save lives. Not every single one, but a whole lot more than without. Still, they’ve managed to convince a whole lot of people otherwise. I will never ever understand a society that has so many school shootings that we have to do active shooter drills with five-year-olds, but somehow we think wearing a mask is traumatic to children. Can someone please explain that to me?
Still, the political points have been scored, and it’s time to move on. If we lived in a rational universe, Beshear and the General Assembly would come together to decide on the scientifically based best practices to deal with the worst health threat we’ve had in 100 years. As it is, it looks like we’re going to have all the freedom we want — to watch more people die.
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 11:52 AM.
