‘We’ll see what people listen to’: Minns, Sedgwick County clash over mask advice
Despite opposition from their chief health officer, Sedgwick County commissioners Wednesday abandoned their recommendation that businesses and local governments encourage masks and social distancing to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Commissioners held on to the part of the county’s most recent COVID order, which encourages people to get vaccinations.
But they deleted the recommendations for masks and social distancing, replacing it with a statement saying the county “encourages businesses and organizations to determine, in their best judgment, whether to require individuals to wear masks or other face coverings and/or to social distance from one another.”
Dr. Garold Minns, county health officer and dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita, advised the commissioners to keep the rule in place until everyone has an opportunity to be vaccinated.
“We’re still having about 200 to 300 known cases per week in Sedgwick County,” he said. “We still have patients in the ICUs. We still have patients on ventilators. We still have patients dying of COVID.
“It’s not near as many as it was in November, thank goodness, largely due to the fact that people have been wearing masks and the vaccine has helped.”
Although there have been some “breakthrough cases” among the vaccinated, those have been mild and nobody in Sedgwick County has died from COVID after getting their shots, Minns said.
The new language was proposed by Commission Chairman Pete Meitzner and passed on a 4-1 vote, with Commissioner Jim Howell opposed. Howell dissented because he didn’t want the county to have any COVID orders on record anymore, even ones that are purely advisory.
Meitzner said he proposed the language he did because he thinks recent recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control are “kind of in conflict and confusing with the medical community somewhat.”
“Businesses, they’re in a trying time to determine what they want to do,” he said. “And I want to respect the businesses.”
He said he opted to keep the part of the order recommending vaccination because if the county repealed its advisory order entirely, “There could be an assumption that the Sedgwick County Board of Health thinks this is all over with and I don’t feel that way.”
Minns said there’s been a widespread misunderstanding of the recent health advisories by CDC, which say that only people who are fully vaccinated could go maskless in public with minimal risk to themselves and others.
Minns said only 30 to 40% of Wichita-area residents meet that standard and the unvaccinated are still at risk.
He took the commission’s repeal of his advice philosophically.
“Well, I verbally said I strongly recommend it, so I’m on record to the public that that’s my opinion,” he said. “I don’t think that taking it off a piece of paper necessarily means people are more likely” not to wear masks and social distance.
“I had an opportunity to at least express my opinion that it’s still a very important thing,” Minns said. “So we’ll see what people listen to.”
Howell favored eliminating all official county health recommendations on COVID and verbally fenced with Minns during a 40-minute discussion leading up to the vote.
Howell’s primary contention was that the county’s recommendation — which replaced an earlier mask mandate and binding restrictions on public gatherings — still carried weight with businesses and smaller governments.
“If you look at Wichita and the city of Derby and other cities around the county, a lot of these places are actually referencing the county resolution,” he said. “They reference that county document as justification for a local order . . . The point of this potential repeal today is just to remove Sedgwick County from the argument.”
Minns told the commission it’s too early to remove the county from the argument and reminded commissioners that he’s the health officer and “I’m speaking to you as the board of health.”
“At least 50% or greater of our community is not immune to this virus, either through natural infection or vaccination,” Minns said. “We’re working on getting that (vaccination) number higher, but the number of people taking appointments has decreased.”
Howell pressed Minns on what he thinks would be a proper threshold for the county to stop recommending masks.
Minns replied that he would foresee that coming when everyone who wants the vaccine has access to it, including children.
Minns said the county is just getting started vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds, who were ineligible for vaccination until about a week ago. Younger children remain ineligible while the vaccine is tested for effectiveness, although it’s already been found safe for them, he said.
And while children are at low risk of dying from COVID, physicians are seeing substantial long-term effects from infections in children and adults, he said.
One complication is a higher rate of diabetes in COVID survivors, which is not clearly understood, he said. And “now we’re seeing other organs that are having chronic effects, including mental effects.”
But Howell countered that he thinks education and personal responsibility would be as effective as a county recommendation.
“I do recommend the vaccine, let’s be clear,” he said. “I think for somebody who’s not been vaccinated they should be personally responsible to mitigate these risks because they’re educated on these risks.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 4:24 PM.
