‘This is unstoppable’: America's midwest braces itself for a Covid-19 surge

 

Three months ago, the Republican governor of Missouri chose not to wear a mask in a shop, because he said he wasn’t going to let the government tell him what to do. Mike Parson visited a hardware store to celebrate its reopening after he lifted Missouri’s coronavirus lockdown over the objections of health professionals and mayors of major cities.

Parson said the worst of the pandemic was past and the economic impact of the shutdown was worse than the virus. As for masks, the governor dismissively claimed “there was a lot of information on both sides” over whether to wear one so he wasn’t going to require people to do so.

Three months later, Covid-19 is surging in Missouri and in many other parts of the midwest that imagined they had escaped the worst of the pandemic.

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Health specialists predict a sharp increase in deaths across the region in the coming weeks that will be made significantly worse in some states by the politicians who followed Donald Trump’s lead in undermining medical advice and in questioning the value of masks.

Anthony Fauci, the president’s lead coronavirus expert, recently warned the midwest’s political leaders to follow the science.

“Some states are not doing that,” he said. “We would hope that they all now rethink what happens when you don’t adhere to that. We’ve seen it in plain sight in the southern states that surged.”

Coronavirus deaths in the midwest remain a fraction of the nearly 160,000 recorded during the pandemic across the US. But Missouri is second only to Oklahoma in the number of new positive tests for the virus over the past two weeks. The state has recorded more deaths than Japan and several European countries, and more new cases per day than Germany. Earlier this week, the White House coronavirus task force named Kansas City as a primary area of concern.