By Sherman Smith
Tribune News Service
TOPEKA — The state’s top health official has fielded questions from policymakers, legislators, news reporters and even children.
But if you wondered how Kansas Department of Health and Environment secretary Lee Norman felt about the decision by Republican legislators to overturn the governor’s ban on large church crowds, you didn’t need to ask.
Norman made his frustration known in a tweet late Wednesday. “Nothing fun, nothing fancy,” Norman said. “Whatever Kansas legislators do doesn’t reverse what the public needs to do. Stay home so we can beat this scourge. Despite what the ‘leaders’ of the Legislature say. We are so close, and they are doing politics. Don’t fall for it! I am SO angry! Shame!”
Responding to feedback, Norman added: “I am a nice, temperate man. But not tonight. I’m angry at what ‘leaders’ did, who put all of us at risk for their political posturing. And our kids and our elders.”
Gov. Laura Kelly’s executive order limited church gatherings to no more than 10 people. Coronavirus outbreaks have been linked to three church gatherings.
Governors in 44 states have imposed similar restrictions, Norman said, and 18 states have closed churches altogether.
Kansas churches were ordered closed during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Still, Republicans said they opposed the governor’s order because it violated religious rights.
“The governor should not use this crisis, or any other crisis, as a basis to restrict our constitutional rights,” said Senate President Susan Wagle, a Republican from Wichita who is running for a U.S. Senate seat. “This is the people’s government, always will be, and I will carry their voices when the call is clear. This is still America.”
Over the past five weeks, Norman has dished advice and science to anyone who would listen about the threat of COVID-19. Health officials have documented 42 deaths and more than 1,100 infections in Kansas as of Thursday morning, with numbers expected to escalate sharply for at least two more weeks.
When Norman isn’t dressing down adults for not taking stay-at-home orders and other guidelines seriously, he sets aside time to answer questions from Kansas children who might be hesitant to ask difficult questions of their parents and teachers.
In a five-part series of videos, Norman provided the following responses to kids of middle school ages.
If you hug or high-five someone, can you get coronavirus? The answer is, yeah, you could. It’s transmitted by direct touch, and a high-five could do that. That’s why it’s really important to make sure that the surfaces around you are clean and your hands are kept clean and you’re not always touching your face.
The other thing that you can do as a kid is, when you see anybody in your family, you can be like a little policeman and just say, “Dad, don’t put your fingers in that bag of potato chips without washing your hands.”
If I get a dog kiss, will I get the virus? I don’t think you should ever get a dog kiss. You don’t know where their mouth has been. But to more directly answer the question, dogs are not known to carry the coronavirus, so I think the answer is no, but I would not make it a practice to get dog kisses because they have other things that could make you sick, so probably not a good idea.
I want to know when I can come back to my school with my friends. The reason you’re not in school with your friends is because of the fact that this coronavirus, COVID-19, seems to be more prevalent, more common, when people, whether they’re kids or adults, gather together. So that’s why you’re not in school.
Once the number of infections and the amount of sickness caused by this goes to a very low amount, then you’ll be able to go back to school and back to your friends.
So even though you’re not in school, I suspect that you wonder why you can’t be with your friends now. And the reason is, it’s not a great idea to congregate together because you’ll run the risk of having each other catch the same infection.
What’s a pangolin? What a pangolin is is a spiny anteater, and they are in Asia. The reason that these have been talked about in recent times is because of the fact that some of their genetic material, which means the things that make a pangolin a pangolin, have gotten into the coronavirus, and that has added to it.
It’s really a creature about the size of a football. It’s a pretty harmless creature, but it seems to have had some impact on the virus.
What is the likelihood that someone in the middle school years could be infected? It’s really not very likely. The vast majority of the cases are in older people and people with illnesses. It can happen in children, and there are occasionally kids that get infected with the coronavirus so that they have the symptoms, but it’s not happening very much.
And there’s probably a lot of kids that actually catch the virus but don’t ever manifest any symptoms or maybe just a very minor illness. So thankfully, middle school kids and children in general are relatively protected from the virus.
It doesn’t mean that you can turn a blind eye to it. You still have to do the things that are important — hand-washing, covering your cough by coughing into your elbow, not touching your face and picking your nose, and sticking fingers into your ears and everything.