Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 55

The rate of new cases in the Kansas City metro area is now higher than it ever was last summer (though still not nearly as high as during the nightmarish fall/winter surge). Given the transmissibility of the Delta variant, it seems destined to just keep rocketing up, right? Maybe, but something interesting has happened with Delta in England. After about a month or two of extreme surge, new cases there have dropped rapidly in the last two weeks. England has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the U.S., and much higher rate of masking (95% of people there are doing it, according to one survey), so it's not a perfect comparison. But cases have also declined rapidly in India after Delta ravaged that country. It could be that Delta spreads so fast that it essentially burns itself out, running through a population and infecting all the easy "marks" (people who have no immunity from vaccine or prior infection, aren't masking and are in close contact with others who aren't masking), and then finding itself fenced in. It's just a theory, and not anything to bank on, but based on the evidence from overseas, it does seem like Delta fades just as dramatically as it surges. And the metrics in Kansas this week are not nearly as bad as I feared they would be. 

The Good: Hospital ICU capacity statewide rose from 23% to 25%, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. The KC metro area was up from 17% to 21% and Wichita region was up from 19% to 20%. The only area of real concern was northeast Kansas (which I assume means everything other than KC — such as Lawrence, Topeka and maybe Leavenworth). There, ICU capacity was down to 15%. That's something to keep an eye on. Overall COVID hospitalizations statewide rose from 366 to 415, but I still take that as sort of a good sign. That's an increase of about 50 patients in a week, whereas the previous week we saw an increase of about 95. So the pace of new hospitalizations may be slowing, even if total hospitalizations are still rising.  

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, in Kansas stayed at 1.2 this week. That means cases are still rising, but they aren't rising at a faster rate than they were the week before. I would love to see this number go down. As we all know by now, below 1.0 is where we want to be. 

The Ugly: Test positivity rose from 31% to 33.7%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's fourth-worst in the country behind Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama. It's not a huge increase, but it was pretty high to begin with.

Bonus: I have seen a disconcerting number of people on social media asserting that the vaccines "don't work" since the CDC issued its new guidance on masks. It's just not true, and if you want some evidence, look to Vermont. I have been checking the state health department's COVID-19 dashboard there regularly, because it's our most fully vaccinated state at nearly 70% of all residents (that's not just ELIGIBLE residents, that's everybody, including the kids who are too young to get the shot). The Delta variant has been present in Vermont since at least early June, but it has not had nearly the devastating effect there that it has had in Missouri. In fact, it's had almost no effect at all. Cases are up a bit, but hospitalizations have barely budged, fluctuating from about 3-5 people at any given time (yes, Vermont is a small state, but having only a few hospital beds in the ENTIRE STATE taken up by COVID patients is still amazing). And, get this: there has not been a single COVID death in Vermont for the last three weeks. Vaccines work. Even against the Delta variant, Vermont's high vaccination rate has succeeded in turning COVID, a disease that killed more than 500,000 Americans in a single year, into something akin to a common cold or flu.