Ten months in, pandemic protocols are continuing to frustrate seemingly everyone

Just before Thanksgiving, a Wichita businesswoman met with a client who said, “I’m going to leave my mask on because I have a cold.”

While she should have left her mask on regardless, the bigger issue is what the client didn’t say: She’d been tested for COVID-19 and was awaiting the result. When it came back positive, she then had to try to trace the many people she’d encountered through her job dealing with the public because her mask didn’t offer complete protection like she thought.

“I just don’t know why people don’t get it,” said the businesswoman who was exposed — and had to skip Thanksgiving plans as a result. “They think that this mask is their holy grail and that this gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want to do.”

She said a mask is “an additional precaution. It’s not the precaution.”

Medical professionals who are battling the coronavirus are also still battling behavior from people who are either confused about the dos and don’ts of pandemic protocols or from those who disagree about the need for them.

Sedgwick County health officer Garold Minns has pleaded with the public to wear masks but cautions they’re still only about 70% to 80% effective.

“It’s not like you’re in a space helmet that you’re completely out of contact with other people,” he said.

Masks are just one part of virus defense. They’re meant to work with social distancing, hand washing and sanitizing. But even all of those things together aren’t enough if you actually have COVID.

“If you’re having symptoms, whether you have a mask on or not you shouldn’t be out and about,” Minns said.

There are a number of questions related to immunity as well. Many people who have had the virus believe they’re safe from getting it again, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Maggie Hagan of Infectious Disease Consultants, who also is medical director of infection prevention for Ascension Via Christi, said there are reports of reinfections through different strains of the virus — strains that can be tested only through a research laboratory, not in a general medical care setting.

“Also, how long does your antibody last after your case of the coronavirus?” she said. “There’s too many unanswered questions for any of us to say, ‘Oh, it’s safe,’ and ‘Do this.’

“We can all have theories,” Hagan said, but they need “to be backed by actual science.”

Also, she said there’s a question of what could happen if the virus gets in the nasopharynx, or the part of the throat behind the nose, of someone who has already had COVID.

“Could you be a source of transmission even if you don’t get infected?” Hagan said. “We just don’t know enough about this virus yet.”

Hagan and Minns both acknowledge that some people may not be following guidelines because of fluctuating protocol advice early in the pandemic.

“What saddens me the most about it is I detect there is a loss of faith in public health, and I think that’s misguided,” Hagan said.

Particularly when COVID was new, she said health officials were learning as they went.

“I trust public health,” Hagan said. “For the benefit of the health of our world, we need public health.”

Minns, too, is disheartened.

“There are some people that still feel this is a hoax,” he said. “They think it’s manufactured for political reasons and that it’s part of the deep state, whatever that is.”

Minns said he has a friend whose son is in healthcare but is a skeptic about the virus and protocols surrounding it.

The mother is “just beside herself,” he said.

“It discourages me because I don’t see how you can feel this way. Do you think we’re just putting patients in the hospital and calling them COVID? And who are these patients in their ICUs? . . . It doesn’t make sense. It’s illogical.”

Minns said it’s a shame the pandemic had to happen during a time when the nation is so divided politically.

“There’s an element in our society that are just kind of anti-science. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

Another issue is a belief that the virus isn’t that bad. People get sick then “they’re kind of like, ‘Well, what’s the big deal?’ ” Hagan said. “The big deal is what we see.”

She said every day she wakes up to a text from a nurse informing her of a patient who has died from COVID.

“That’s been happening for months. Sometimes it’s more than one patient.”

And it’s not always an elderly patient — another fallacy that’s widely believed. Hagan said predictions about who will suffer the worst from the virus aren’t always right.

She said she’s sent a 95-year-old COVID patient back to a nursing home without oxygen but then watched as the family of a 23-year-old COVID victim gathered around his bed to say goodbye.

Even if COVID does harm the elderly more than anyone, Minns is aghast at people who say things like, “Well, they’re one foot in the grave already.”

“I just think that’s so anti-humanist. . . . I can’t tolerate people who talk that way.”

Minns said that would be like if victims of a car accident were brought to a hospital, and the elderly ones were left to be treated last.

“That would be so unethical.”

Though the issues are complicated and the protocols nuanced, the businesswoman — who prefers not to be named so her client won’t get upset — said it shouldn’t be all that difficult to understand.

She thought about that as she crammed a lost week’s worth of work into the week following her quarantine.

If the client had simply stayed home, “None of this would have happened.”