LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) - About 20 minutes into a recent press conference, Lee Norman, the man spearheading Kansas’s response to the novel coronavirus, coughed.
People noticed.
“Is he coughing into his hand?” one person asked on a Facebook livestream. “Your cough worries me. Hope you are ok,” wrote another.
Three weeks ago, Norman was a well-regarded but little-known secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. But COVID-19 has turned the 67-year-old physician and former Air Force flight surgeon into must-watch pandemic TV for the state of Kansas and the Kansas City metro, The Wichita Eagle reported.
Like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become a national figure for his White House briefings, Norman tries to bring facts and reassurance to a jittery public.
“I have told my constituents that he is the credible source for all information on the virus and that all roads point to Dr. Lee Norman,” said Kansas Sen. Julia Lynn, an Olathe Republican. “Obviously, we have Fauci on the national level, but on the state level he is our guy.”
Norman’s regular live streamed briefings from Topeka attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of viewers for no-nonsense advice (often boiled down to “stay home”) and the latest case and death counts usually leavened with some hopeful development, such as an advance in testing capacity.
He can also deploy a dry wit when he wants. During a virtual town hall last month, a question about President Donald Trump wanting to reopen the country by Easter prompted a quick retort: “Did he say what calendar year?”
To the public, he is something of a cross between a family doctor calmly delivering a tough diagnosis - Gov. Laura Kelly likens him to Marcus Welby, the genial general practitioner of 1970s TV - and a professor eager to talk about new scientific developments. Others think his white medical coat, white hair and bespectacled look gives him a Col. Sanders vibe.
“I think he’s very reassuring to Kansans that he’s got their best interest in mind and that his advice is good advice to follow,”Kelly said.
Norman is a colonel in the Kansas National Guard, but that’s about where the comparison ends. His moment center stage culminates years of preparation and study spent in the shadow of past pandemics. Like many in his field, he’s been expecting a day like this would come.
“It’s never been very far away,” he said in a phone interview. “The fact that I’m in this position and it happens to be now is two lines that intersected in time and space. But I’ve been thinking and doing this kind of work for a long time.”
As chief medical officer of the University of Kansas Health System, Norman learned first hand about the havoc a pandemic can wreak. While neither H1N1 flu (2009) nor Ebola (2014) became a COVID-sized calamity, they gave Norman a preview of the current crisis, especially the lack of protective equipment and shortage of supplies.
In October 2014, the hospital treated a patient with Ebola-like symptoms. The patient ultimately tested negative, but prompted a full-scale response that put the facility through its paces. The case costs included $100,000 in personal protective equipment.
Even earlier, in 2009, Norman was forced to prioritize which hospital staff would receive the flu vaccine amid a limited number of doses amid H1N1. According to an October 2009 hospital newsletter, he also asked staff to reuse N95 masks until they were damaged or visibly soiled because of limited supply.
“It was the same questions about the number of ICU beds, ventilators and staff,” Norman said.
He described the coronavirus pandemic as kind of like “getting the band back together again” after 11 years.
“I’ve always predicted we were going to have one like this,” Norman said, perhaps immodestly, advising a reporter to review past lectures he had given on modern epidemics.
“People kind of scoffed at me,” he said. “I even suggested it would be a subject – that a pandemic would be a threat to national security.”
An Iowa native, Norman earned his medical degree from the University of Minnesota and completed a residency in family medicine in Texas - also receiving aerospace medicine training at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio.
He spent more than 20 years in Seattle practicing medicine and began serving as chief medical officer of the Swedish Health System (the network of hospitals in Seattle, not the country) in 1991. From 2007 to 2017, he was the chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System.
In the last few days before she took office, Kelly announced Norman as her nominee to lead the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The Senate unanimously confirmed him in March 2019.
Norman maintains residences in both Kansas City and Topeka. When he has spare time, he enjoys canning and pickling, as well as collecting Eskimo art.
On the recent morning Norman was interviewed for this profile he started in Kansas City at a meeting with the Mexican consulate about the virus and how it was affecting the poor. At the end of the meeting, he said, they posed for a photo together next to the U.S. and Mexican flags, but realized they weren’t standing six-feet apart. So they spread out.
The consulate later posted a photo on Twitter showing Norman and the other participants each standing apart.
Later, he would have calls with legislators and fellow state health officers, a chance to talk “inside baseball.”
Next was the Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center, a joint venture of the Kansas Attorney General and Kansas Adjutant General focused on homeland security. Norman, a colonel in the Kansas National Guard, said he would receive a classified briefing on the global impact of the virus and left it at that.
Later, back in the office, he would join a virtual town hall on Zoom to answer questions from Johnson County lawmakers and their constituents.
Norman said that “as much as I tire of hearing myself talk, and I do” it’s important to stay connected with citizens.
“I’m not an infectious diseases specialist, but you don’t have to be an infectious diseases specialist and arguably, you don’t really have to be a doctor as long as you have a great team of people that has all the essential elements in order to pull this off well,” Norman said of his role managing the state’s response.
R.W. Trewyn, the liaison to the National Bio-Agro Defense Facility at Kansas State University, has known Norman the better part of a decade. The two participated in monthly meetings of a team dedicated to studying biological threats at the Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center, he said.
Trewyn said Norman brought “his understanding of the human health side” to the gatherings.
Norman is a “follow me-type leader,” Trewyn said. He understands the situation, is a subject matter expert and is willing to make decisions with the information available, he added.
“You need somebody that’s decisive and a decision maker in these sorts of times to best protect the state and the country,” Trewyn said.
While Kelly ultimately makes key calls related to closing schools, banning mass gatherings and, most recently, issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, Norman has been among her top advisers during the crisis.
He has often been at Kelly’s side, literally, during numerous press conferences over the past month.
“I certainly knew when I appointed him that he had been through these kind of things before and that he had experience and that he was good at it,” Kelly said.
Not every decision Norman has been involved in has been universally welcome. His move to reduce testing in Johnson County two weeks ago resulted in pushback from residents and local leaders.
Norman scaled back testing to only hospitalized individuals with symptoms amid the state’s dwindling supply of tests and a surging number of cases in the county that pointed to community transmission of the virus.
“I very much take exception however with the KDHE secretary, Lee Norman, making Johnson County sound like a lost cause,” Johnson County Commissioner Mike Brown said at the time.
Norman said that in an ideal world, health officials wouldn’t have to deal with too few tests, too few beds and too little protective equipment. But reality is forcing tough choices.
“Face it, we have to make concessions,” Norman said.
“People think, almost bizarrely, like we’re withholding testing for some sinister reason when in reality, we have the reality that we can’t test everybody that we want to so we have to make choices about how do we get the most benefit from a constrained resource,” he added.
At the state and federal level, elected officials of both parties have consistently voiced confidence in Norman’s response.
Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican and a frequent foe of Kelly, said on March 13 that Norman and his team were “expertly working to gather facts, trends, and risks.” U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts said it’s easy to talk to Norman and that he knows what he’s doing.
“We’re coordinating and we’re working with a very smooth relationship,” Roberts said.
State Rep. John Eplee, an Atchison Republican and a family physician, said he’s spoken with Norman regularly during the pandemic. Their conversations range from tests to advice he’s given to the governor and the epidemiology of the virus.
Norman has done an “extraordinary job with very limited resources,” Eplee said.
“He’s really the man of the hour for Kansas in this time of need.”
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