Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 9

 

The key metrics are starting to show some serious fluctuation from week to week, which makes one wonder which weeks are the anomalies and which are the trend. All we can do is keep tracking and trust the trend will become more clear as we get more data.

The Good: Hospital ICU availability remains stable, at 39% on Sept. 9 with 124 hospitals reporting. It's important to remember that this is a lagging indicator, which means spikes in COVID-19 cases won't show up in hospitals until weeks later. But right now this is going the right direction, but slowly.

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate, or Rt, was 1.03 last week. That's not good, because it's still above 1.0. But it could be a lot worse. The week before it was 1.10, so it's trending the right direction.

The Ugly: The test positivity rate in Kansas was 14.6% last week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's quite bad — it's nowhere near the 5% or less that we want — but again it's better than the week before, when it was a whopping 17.3%. We still have a long ways to go. Hopefully this week was the start of a good trend on both Rt and test positivity.