Business Reopenings Come With Caveats

Kansas City and much of the surrounding area is getting back to work today—incrementally—but it won’t be a return to business as usual.

Conditional authorization is now in place from Kansas City, Mo., for businesses to emerge from a coma induced by the city’s declaration that they were “non-essential” during efforts to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. And many companies are resuming operations in what health-care professionals are calling the New Normal.

“As we get further in, taking this one step at a time, it will fall more and more on individuals and individual responsibility,” said Dana Hawkinson, a specialist in infectious diseases for the University of Kansas Health System. For those who have sheltered in place at home but are now venturing back to job sites, he said, “that means doing the simple things, not go out of the home if you’re sick, washing your hands frequently with sanitizer, don’t touch your face, cough into your elbow and maintain six feet of distance from each other as we continue to into this new normal.”

Hawkinson was joined by the health system’s top executives, CEO Bob Page and Kansas City president Tammy Peterman, along with medical officer Steven Stites and Joe Reardon, president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

Their discussion framed general outlines for how companies, especially the smaller ones, can safely resume operations without posing health risks to employees, patrons or clients.

“We want to be smart and protect people and those who are visitors,” Reardon said, referring to back-to-work guidelines the chamber released last week. “Businesses, small and large, need to think through what needs to happen to be safe in the workplace.”

Stites noted that the main hospital had seen an uptick in COVID-19 patients in recent days. After falling from a high of 39 several weeks ago, to a low in the upper teens last week, that patient census was back to 31 as of Sunday, with roughly half of them in intensive-care beds and five on ventilators.

The hospital itself, Peterman said, was also getting back on track with traditional services as the focus turns to bringing in patients for surgeries put on hold while it ramped up for a COVID-19 case onslaught that never fully materialized.

During the crisis, Page said, the hospital’s daily census fell to around 500, “but it’s not like we wre closed. We have heard more about more strokes and heart attacks at home where people didn’t come in for treatment–we can’t allow that to continue. We’ve got to encourage friends and loved ones to get back into the health-care system.”

Reardon, addressing a question about the potential economic impact of the economic slowdown, said the figure can’t be calculated yet, but would be substantial. “The big question ,” he said, “is what does recovery look like, how quickly can it come? There are some practical realities, but COVID will be with us for a long time. We all have to figure out how to have the economy growing in the right direction. But the thing that’s encouraging is, we’re pretty diversified, relative to other regions. The hit won’t be as extreme here as other places, and our recovery will be more steady.

“But doing business has changed,” Reardon cautioned. “We’re not going back to normal operations. Not for the foreseeable future.”