‘Updates soon’: Mayor Quinton Lucas says city is looking at new CDC COVID guidance

Kansas City leaders are looking at the latest guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released new masking guidance Tuesday.

Mayor Quinton Lucas posted on Twitter that city leaders will “review and provide any updates soon.”

“We are watching CDC guidance, as we have throughout the pandemic. Kansas City will review and provide any updates soon, with a focus on the safety and health of all in our region,” Lucas wrote ahead of the CDC’s update. “The increasing infection rate in our state and area is a substantial public health concern.”

The CDC on Tuesday backpedaled on its masking guidelines and recommended that even vaccinated people wear masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where the coronavirus is surging.

In a news conference after Tuesday’s Board of Police Commissioners meeting, Lucas said he appreciates the CDC taking this step, adding that “it’s a lot easier to act with them than outside of them.” He said the city will look to respond “as soon as possible.”

He said the city will reach out to other jurisdictions in the region as well.

New guidance

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a news briefing that the agency now recommends that, in areas with “substantial and high transmission” of the virus, fully vaccinated people should wear masks in public indoor settings, including schools, to help prevent the spread of the highly-contagious delta variant.

She said the new data shows that the delta variant behaves differently than other strains of the virus and that in “rare occasions” some vaccinated people infected with it may be able to spread the virus to others.

The CDC guidance says fully vaccinated people may choose to wear a mask regardless of their area’s transmission level, especially if they’re immunocompromised or at “increased risk for severe disease from COVID-19” or if they live with someone who is immunocompromised, at an increased risk or not fully vaccinated.

Fully vaccinated people who know they were exposed to someone with “suspected or confirmed COVID-19” should be tested for the virus three to five days after they were exposed and should wear a mask in public indoor settings for 14 days or until they get a negative test result.

The new guidance follows recent decisions in Los Angeles and St. Louis to revert to indoor mask mandates amid a spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations that have been especially bad in the South. The country is averaging more than 57,000 cases a day and 24,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations.

The CDC says about 49% of the total U.S. population are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and about 57% have received at least one dose of a vaccine.

In Missouri, 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated and 47% has initiated vaccination.

After the St. Louis announcement, which went into effect Monday, Lucas continued to encourage residents to get vaccinated. Kansas City lifted its mask mandate in May.

“Still, the best way to save lives and beat the pandemic once and for all continues to be through vaccination: it is safe, highly effective, and free,” Lucas said in a statement last week.

Kansas City mask advisory

Almost two weeks ago, 10 Kansas City health agencies — prompted by rising COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and low vaccination rates — issued a joint public health advisory recommending unvaccinated people wear masks.

For much of the pandemic, the CDC advised Americans to wear masks outdoors if they were within 6 feet of one another.

Then in April, as vaccination rates rose sharply, the agency eased its guidelines on the wearing of masks outdoors, saying that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to cover their faces unless they were in a big crowd of strangers. In May, the guidance was eased further for fully vaccinated people, allowing them to stop wearing masks outdoors in crowds and in most indoor settings.

The guidance still called for wearing masks in crowded indoor settings, like buses, planes, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters, but it cleared the way for reopening workplaces and other venues.

Subsequent CDC guidance said fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks at summer camps or at schools, either.

For months COVID cases, deaths and hospitalizations were falling steadily, but those trends began to change at the beginning of the summer as a mutated and more transmissible version of the coronavirus, the delta variant, began to spread widely, especially in areas with lower vaccination rates.

Children’s Mercy said on Monday that its hospital has reached capacity, full of COVID-19 cases and other childhood diseases.

As of Tuesday, the seven-day rolling average for new cases in the Kansas City metro was 452.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.