Morning Edition; Robert McNab

It's morning edition on K-RPS. On Monday, presidents and executives as six healthcare organizations at Surf Southwest Missouri published an open letter requesting assistance from the elected officials of city and county governments to help slow the spread of COVID-19. On Tuesday, Dr. Robert McNabb of Freeman Hospital in Joplin answered questions about this statement and provided his expertise from working on the front lines of the pandemic. McNabb was first asked why Freeman Hospital wanted to be a part of the message reaching out to city and county officials. The pandemic is a community health issue and it's a problem that cannot be managed without a community response. It's not a physician problem or a nursing problem or an administration problem. It's a community health issue so we have to have all of our partners at the table. I think that the mask mandate from the government is a response to that. We have a need. We have a need for the populace to step up and do their part. I think the reasons why I think it's important to reconsider this.

The first is got to be the health of our citizens. Today, in Missouri, 4,052 new cases every day, and that rate is going up. You know, this is clearly not a very control pandemic. And so we need to be following the social distancing and the masking mandates and the handwashing. In response on Tuesday, the mayors of Web City, Carthage and Carl Junction issued a joint statement saying that they would recommend wearing a mask in public, but that they would not put a mask mandate in effect. While Joplin made a Ryan Stanley issued a separate statement, declaring that he wanted the city to work with other local governments to help. At Tuesday's press conference, Dr. McNabb highlighted that the hospital community has reached out to Joplin City leaders numerous times throughout the pandemic. Well, I can't claim to know the thoughts of them there, but I can tell you that the healthcare community in Joplin has reached out to the City

Council and asked for help. You know, and I imagine that some degree of his response is based on that call for help from all of us. On Thursday, at his weekly COVID-19 press briefing, the Missouri Governor Mike Parsons highlighted once again in a variety of capacities that he will not issue a statewide mask ordinance, regardless of the levels of COVID-19 positivity or the number of fatalities that occur. According to Parsons, it is not the government's role to mandate citizens and protecting themselves against the pandemic. Dr. McNabb sees it differently. So, you know, I think that this is perhaps an all or none phenomenon, you know, when you can go across a border and do whatever you want to and then bring your problems back to the community, I think that there's a real problem with that. And I think that that's when you read that letter from the mayor, he's reaching out not just to Joplin, he's reaching out to

the surrounding communities and saying, this is a larger community issue and we all need to be involved in this. You know, if everybody in this room or everybody that's viewing this, you know, all wears their masks and the people that we know don't, well, then we can still be exposed to that virus, right? Throughout the pandemic in the US, the wearing of masks in public has continued to be divisive on many levels. Perhaps most of all, their effectiveness in preventing from people getting sick and perhaps dying. Dr. McNabb shares his first hand experience. I would offer myself up as exhibit A, you know, I started the COVID units. I ran the COVID unit for the first month and a half by myself, exclusively. I continue to run the COVID units and have constant exposure to those patients and I've had in the past nine months, not one sick day, not one symptom, you know. What do I do? I wear this mask. I wash my hands and I try to socially distance. If you see me at the gym,

you're going to see this mask, right? If you see me at Walmart, you're going to see this mask. You know, but the only person at this point who remembers what I look like without it is my wife. And so I find that just doing the things that we're talking about have kept me completely healthy for most of a year, despite the fact, despite the fact that I have literally been involved as close as you can be to some of the very sickest patients. And I find that it's been 100% effective for me so far. So Dr. Robert McNabb was speaking Tuesday about a letter published and signed this week by six presidents and executives of health care facilities at Surfer Southwest Missouri and the status of the pandemic in the region.