Gov. Parson expects social distancing in state for months, even when orders expire

Gov. Mike Parson outlined what Missouri could look like as businesses start to reopen in a one-on-one interview with ABC 17 News.

Parson said that things will look different as places reopen to the public and that social distancing will likely be practiced for months.

"You're going to have to have a new form of lifestyle a little bit to where social distancing is part of that," Parson said. "And whether it's a restaurant, you may open up a restaurant again, but it's probably not going to be table after table after table that you're going to sit there. We're probably gonna have to make adjustments to that I think the business owners will make that as we see now."

The governor also said that reopening can't all happen at once.

"I think there'll be a change of lifestyle for us for a while and we got to gradually do this, you know. One, we got to make sure this doesn't have a surge and come back so I mean that's the one thing we're all looking at," Parson said.

He also described how hard it is to make the decision to lift a stay-at-home order. Some health groups criticized Parson for waiting as long as he did to issue a "stay-at-home" order. Parson said the slow growth in the rate of new cases the last several days made him cautiously optimistic about the future.

"Everybody stepped up their game, they got their A-game on here. People stayed home, they did what's been asked to do and we see that but, you know, at some point people got to live a life, and we got to weigh all that out and that's a tough decision every day," Parson said. "I've been at this now for almost 30 days coming in here, 30 days, and you know it's danged if you do and danged if you don't, and I get that, but at the end of the day is how do you move Missouri forward and you got to make those decisions and move forward."

When asked how he would justify rolling back government-ordered social distancing, Parson said it would rely on many factors.

"I'm not for sure exactly how I can answer that today to know what that is," Parson said. "One, when there's more testing done. When we know who's affected, who's not. The more testing we do, we're going to find out who's already had the coronavirus and who hasn't, and we're going to get some sort of idea of safety on that as we move forward. And then I think as we go forward we're just going to have to see but it's going to be months before we can ever make that decision."