Kirkpatrick seeks cities’ help to ease rules on churches, youth sports

Clark County Commission Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick on Wednesday urged local governments to collaborate on a plan to enforce public health restrictions within businesses as she prepares to request that rules be loosened for churches, youth sports and conventions.

The idea is to show the state that Southern Nevada should be able to write its own guidelines as it responds to the coronavirus pandemic, Kirkpatrick said during a rare briefing to the Las Vegas City Council. Yet the case for such autonomy requires that cities and the county can effectively weed out bad actors.

“I can’t make all those arguments if I can’t say that everybody’s on the same page,” she said.

Kirkpatrick, who represents urban counties on an influential statewide advisory panel, acknowledged the need to allow some conventions, in a phased approach, and churches to operate normally, while enabling young athletes to play games even if it is without spectators.

There is a 50-person cap on church services, and youth sports are allowed to hold only practices. Kirkpatrick’s push to ease restrictions comes as she said that masks, social distancing and increased testing were working and that the county’s test positivity rate has dipped over the past four weeks to about 13 percent.

“I’m just trying to find the consistency (on enforcement) because as an economy, regionally, we’ve got to move forward,” she said. “We have to figure out how to do that safely. We have to be able to tell the world that we’re doing it safely.”

Some question response

The majority of city lawmakers who responded to Kirkpatrick’s briefing alongside county Fire Chief John Steinbeck echoed the request for collaboration. But some aired grievances.

Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who has pressed for businesses to be able to stay open throughout the crisis, agreed that it was “critical” to have a plan, then criticized what she believed has been a lack of one in general from the state level.

Goodman said the response to the pandemic has routinely changed, and “no matter what side of the fence you’re on, each group of scientists has a different opinion.” Data also changes, she said, and can be manipulated.

But what is clear is that the flu never forced a complete shutdown and the city was not broken before the pandemic started, she said. “What we have done economically and psychologically to every human being that lives here — put this additional stress on them — based on what we believe is truth and accuracy but we won’t know until it’s done,” Goodman said.

Councilwoman Michele Fiore reiterated opposition to the city’s own business enforcement plan, which rolled out in July and used 65 city employees to visit businesses to ensure compliance. Fiore, who had referred to the employees as “snitches,” said the program ran counter to calls for a uniform approach as the city moved forward alone.

She also used the occasion to castigate the effect the response to the pandemic was having on the city and state, pointing to a broken unemployment system, an expected surge in evictions and an increase in domestic violence.

‘Let them play in dirt’

And Fiore questioned how serious the coronavirus should be considered for healthy individuals, citing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Aug. 26 that showed that COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death in just 6 percent of U.S. deaths involving the virus since Feb. 1.

“As we have our Nevada constituents running around living in fear, I want them to also know the good things about it: People aren’t just dying from COVID, right?” Fiore said.

But health experts have warned against using the data to suggest that the appearance of other conditions means that someone did not die from the virus, according to The Associated Press.

COVID-19 has been known to be more dangerous to individuals with underlying health conditions, experts say, which is why regional leaders have emphasized testing vulnerable populations such as the elderly and homeless.

The Southern Nevada Health District said in July that it had not seen a large number of cases among the homeless population.

“Our homeless folks don’t have COVID,” Fiore said Wednesday. “A few of them do, but it’s us, it’s us germaphobes, that all of a sudden that are now exposed to germs that are getting COVID. Our homeless — it’s like kids, let them play in dirt. They don’t get sick.”

Contact Shea Johnson at sjohnson@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @Shea_LVRJ on Twitter.