At the Capitol, masks and COVID precautions on the floor break on party lines

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Utah Rep. Carol Spackman Moss wonders how many of her colleagues have a personal understanding of COVID-19, the way she has from watching two loved ones die after contracting it.

Just last month, she and her sister were sitting by their mother’s bedside in a memory care unit, holding her hand and stroking her hair as she declined and ultimately died from coronavirus.

Moss’s husband, Robert, died on Independence Day. He’d caught the disease months before — she believes from his part-time job at a hardware store — but had never fully regained his strength, and his cardiologist suspected damage to his heart precipitated his downturn.

“Have you lost a family member from COVID?” Moss asked fellow House members last week as they prepared to strike down local mask mandates in the state. The issue was personal to her, she explained.

The Holladay Democrat knows some in the opposite party have also suffered deep loss during the pandemic; one Republican lawmaker spent most of the 2021 session in a hospital bed fighting for his life.

But the political divides over COVID-19 have been even more palpable in the Capitol than they were in last year’s session, she says. Republican legislators have quashed public health measures, cast doubt on the efficacy of masks and largely dispensed with face coverings themselves.

One of Senate President Stuart Adams’ first acts this session was to tell the public he’d tested negative for coronavirus that day, even though he’d actually racked up two positive results. Adams, who finished his five-day quarantine for COVID-19 just before the Legislature convened, failed to wear a mask consistently in the five days following his isolation as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise.

At a news conference just a couple of days into the session, Democratic state Sen. Derek Kitchen rebuked fellow legislators for refusing to mask up at the Capitol while Utah grapples with record case counts and among the nation’s worst infection rates.

House and Senate leaders have indicated they’re tired of talking about coronavirus at the Capitol, though.

“Those are obviously issues that we dealt with last week,” Adams, R-Layton, said Wednesday when asked what thought of Kitchen’s concerns. “I think we have other issues that I’d like to focus on, and some of those are tax cuts and some of the things we’ve talked about today.”

Staff in both chambers refused to answer a list of questions about coronavirus protocols at the Capitol, saying they’d already sufficiently addressed the matter.

“We have appropriate measures in place to ensure the House can conduct the people’s business,” Alexa Roberts, a House GOP spokesperson, wrote in a response to the Tribune. “At this point, we have addressed questions related to our COVID protocols and are now focused on our policy priorities.”

It’s not clear how many lawmakers have contracted coronavirus so far because, unlike last year, the legislative staff have been helping conduct rapid tests this session and are not always willing to disclose the results. The House notified its members they’d be shifting to at-home testing after the first week of lawmaking, and the Senate would not respond when asked if they’re doing the same.

And many asymptomatic cases may be going undetected, says Dr. Andy Pavia, epidemiology director at Primary Children’s Hospital.

About 10% of people about to undergo surgery in Utah wind up testing positive for COVID-19 during the screening process, according to Pavia.

“So it is reasonable to think that one in 10 people walking around the Capitol are positive,” he said.

No answer on whether COVID-positive lawmakers are isolating

State lawmakers last year began the annual, 45-day session amid the looming threat that a COVID-19 outbreak could derail their work — and in preparation, set up an array of health measures as a bulwark against the disease’s spread.

Legislators had to take biweekly rapid tests if they wanted to attend meetings in person, and House representatives were required to wear masks unless they were speaking or eating. Staff members and the public had to cover their faces, too.

The state health department conducted regular testing and updated the media about the number of positive cases they’d detected.

None of that is happening this year.

Rapid testing has been available to officials, but it is only mandatory in the Senate for interns, while the chamber’s lawmakers and staff can opt out if they wish.

After the first week of session, the House planned to send legislators and staff home with rapid tests — and to ask “that you test twice a week and if positive, please remain at home” and comply with health department guidance, according to an email sent earlier this month to representatives.

The House and Senate refused to answer questions about whether there’s any follow-up to make sure COVID-positive lawmakers are isolating.

Legislative leaders haven’t issued any masking rule and, to the contrary, most Republican lawmakers have eschewed face coverings.

“Our protocol with regard to COVID last session … I think you could fairly characterize it as significantly more rigorous than our protocol this year. And yet, the infection numbers were significantly lower,” House Minority Leader Brian King said. “So, from our perspective, as Democrats, I think we look at the other side and just scratch our heads.”

King said legislative leaders didn’t solicit input from Democrats about health precautions but that his caucus members volunteered their opinions anyway.

Last year’s safety protocols were largely successful at containing the disease spread, they said in a letter that asked House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, to consider instituting similar ones now and mandate that the public wear masks inside the Capitol.

King said he appreciates the testing resources that are available and doesn’t feel that differences over COVID-19 precautions have strained the relationship between the parties. But he doesn’t understand why Republican lawmakers have generally resisted masking this session.

“Is it just that you are elevating this ideology over common sense? Is it that you find masks so burdensome? you ... Or you’re just so irritated by them that you don’t want to put up with the relatively minor inconvenience of them?” the Salt Lake City Democrat said. “Maybe it’s a combination of those things, but it’s inexplicable from our perspective.”

Rep. Steve Waldrip is among the GOP lawmakers who have worn masks at times in the first days of the session.

“Playing the odds, with a couple of members of our body having tested positive, I felt like it was a wise move to put a mask on,” said the Eden Republican, who was also one of 12 Republicans to resist overturning Salt Lake County’s mask mandate last week. “If we get more positives in our body, I’ll put a mask back on.”

But it’s not clear whether lawmakers will always know when colleagues are ill.

The local health department likely won’t be able to identify an outbreak — defined as two or more cases in a single location within two weeks — at the Capitol because community transmission is so widespread it’s almost impossible to pinpoint a specific source of infection, a spokesman for the Salt Lake County agency said. And unless state officials report rapid test results to the health department, they won’t know about positives in the first place.

The Utah House is not tracking or revealing the results of COVID-19 tests this session, while the Senate did not answer the Tribune’s question about whether it would.

Adams disclosed his coronavirus diagnosis the week before the legislative session began, and since it launched, Reps. Mark Strong and Angela Romero have also said they tested positive.

Strong, who has continued to appear at the Legislature in person, sometimes unmasked, has not offered particulars about when he tested positive, although he reportedly began experiencing symptoms the week before the session started. Romero said she became infected at the Capitol and has been working remotely.

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who spent weeks on oxygen after getting COVID-19 in 2020, last week reported she’d tested positive for the disease again.

The mask fights

There’s also been a sharp divide between the parties over the value or certain health precautions.

On the opening day of the 2022 session, Sen. Dan McCay defended his push to overturn Salt Lake County’s mask mandate by comparing such orders to trying to “wave your arms out the window of a car to try to slow yourself down.”

The next day, he would continue to cast doubt on the efficacy of masks in speeches delivered with his face uncovered.

Asked if the science supported mask mandates in the pandemic’s current phase, he told Senate colleagues, “it just depends on who you read and what you read and where you read it.”

“Based on the latest information I’ve seen on omicron, there isn’t effectivity in prevention for a mask,” the Riverton Republican continued. “It’s so contagious that masks are irrelevant in the spread or stopping the spread.”

McCay did not respond to a text message asking where he saw that information.

Local infectious disease experts say that claim is categorically false — and have raised concern that state leaders are displaying a lackadaisical attitude toward the pandemic even as the disease spikes and once again squeezes the state’s health care systems.

It is true that stopping disease spread has gotten harder with the highly contagious omicron variant, said Dr. Angela Dunn, the Salt Lake County Health Department’s executive director. But that’s a reason to upgrade to an N95 or KN95 mask rather than to abandon face coverings, she said.

Even high-quality masks aren’t foolproof, Dunn explained, but they are effective in preventing disease spread, especially in combination with other components of a multilayered public health strategy.

And Pavia said cloth masks are preferable to nothing, although surgical masks are more powerful shields against the virus, and KN95s and N95s are better still.

“Not wearing masks during the legislative session goes against the science and public health advice,” he said.

Masks are also most effective at stopping spread, Dunn said, if almost everyone wears them. But only a handful of Utah lawmakers, largely Democrats, are donning them as they sit elbow-to-elbow in committee rooms and on the chamber floors.

Legislators have pointed to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent comments about how omicron will “find just about everybody,” and some have even suggested there could be a silver lining to catching the variant. Speaking recently to the press, Adams said omicron could “help protect” people by giving them immunity to more dangerous forms of the virus.

Fauci didn’t mean to imply people should abandon caution and let coronavirus run rampant in their communities, Pavia said — especially when health care systems are overwhelmed, schools and essential services struggle to cope with a surge of sick employees and there are shortages in antiviral drugs to combat the disease.

“Choosing to get infected now will worsen all of these problems,” he said. “If people are careful now and end up getting infected in February or March, they’ll have better access to antivirals and other treatments, better access to health care, and they won’t be as much of a burden on society.”