At the Lake of the Ozarks, history repeats itself.
By now, you’ve seen the videos and photos of massive crowds at various bars and entertainment venues at Missouri’s top tourist destination over the Memorial Day weekend. Some of you were there. Thousands of mostly youngish people, reveling in the sun, crowded together in shallow pools, bellying up to the bar, enjoying a communal escape from the past couple of months of self-isolation.
As the weekend approached, the American death toll from the coronavirus pandemic . The images quickly became a political litmus test.
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Republicans — many of them, at least — pointed to the photos as a sign of our freedom. It’s time to reopen the economy fully. Masks? We don’t need no stinkin’ masks. The virus be damned.
Democrats — many of them, at least — looked at the same images and feared a second wave of COVID-19 in ºüÀêÊÓƵ and Kansas City as young people spread the virus among themselves and then return to the slower, more deliberate reopening of the economies in the urban areas that have been hotbeds of death.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Lyda Krewson called the Lake of the Ozarks gatherings “disturbing.†ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Executive Sam Page issued a travel advisory. They’re both Democrats. The Camden County sheriff, a Republican, said there was nothing he could do.
Nearly a decade ago, the political equation was quite a bit different, if not totally reversed.
Before the Memorial Day weekend in 2009, the administration of Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, sat on test results that showed high concentrations of E. coli, a highly infectious bacteria that can induce a variety of sicknesses. In June, when it became known that the Department of Natural Resources knew of the tests before the big holiday weekend but didn’t disclose them or close public beaches at the Lake of the Ozarks, Republicans, who controlled the Missouri Legislature, as they do now, were incensed.
Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, a leading voice in the Missouri GOP at the time, said the failure created a “crisis in confidence†in state government.
The Missouri Senate held hearings to investigate the delay in the DNR reports. Nixon, too, said he was outraged and fired a couple of staff members and suspended another. There was unity, it seemed, in the fury that state bureaucrats appeared to choose economic interests over the health of the state’s residents and tourists.
Make no mistake, the coronavirus pandemic is a different beast than some bacteria in a lake caused mostly by sewer discharge that tends to dissipate in a few days.
But there is no push in the Legislature for hearings to investigate ever-changing COVID-19 numbers coming out of the state Department of Health and Senior Services. Some of those numbers were changed because of a snafu at the federal level. But local health officials and epidemiologists are worried that the state numbers on coronavirus testing can’t be trusted.
No subpoenas have been issued over the state’s failed purchase of protective gear from a company shrouded in secrecy that won a contract to provide N95 masks and delivered defective ones.
Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, has moved the goalposts back on how many tests have to be performed in a week or a month in order to safely reopen the economy. There is still very little robust contact tracing, which the health experts tell us is necessary to avoid another wave of massive infection and death in vulnerable economies as we migrate back to restaurants, barbers and public venues like, yes, the Lake of the Ozarks. Parson, similar to President Donald Trump, eschews a mask in public. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, wears one.
Forget MAGA hats. Masks are the new coin of the political realm.
Is this really where we are as a society these days? Can we never see past the “R†or “D†after some elected official’s name, no matter the issue?
Perhaps the investigation into a public health crisis at the Lake of the Ozarks nearly a decade ago only happened because the Legislature was of one party and the governor was of another, but that’s not what it felt like at the time, at least early on.
Neither E. coli, nor COVID-19 asks political affiliation before it infects its unsuspecting host. Similarly, public health matters should not be seen through a partisan lens.
But in 2020, it seems, they are, and that’s unfortunate regardless of your political affiliation.
By the way, about that E. coli.
The most recent test at Lake of the Ozarks Public Beach No. 1 came back with of the dangerous bacteria. The state posted a warning on its public beach testing website:
“Swimming is not recommended.â€