Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 5

 

This week Kansas' infection reproduction rate is almost unchanged, COVID-19 cases in hospital ICUs  are holding steady at a relatively high but manageable level, and test positivity keeps getting worse. This week's bonus is another chart that (inadvertently) makes a strong case for masks.

The Good: The state's ICUs are stable, with 110 hospitals reporting 37% capacity available on Aug. 13. That's almost identical to last week (38%) and the week before (36%). Cases numbers keep rising, but over the last few months doctors and hospitals nationwide have gotten better at keeping people from becoming ill enough to require an ICU bed. It's one of the few success stories of the pandemic in the U.S. so far.

The Bad: After a couple weeks of improvement, the infection reproduction rate (Rt) in Kansas ticked up a notch from 1.04 to 1.05. That's not good, but I'm hopeful it's just a brief plateau and we can continue the downward trend next week and get below that magic number of 1.0, which is when you start decreasing overall infections. Social distancing and wearing masks helps. It's also vitally important that people stay home if they're sick. Let's make sure each infection doesn't cause a bunch of other infections.

The Ugly: The test positivity rate is bad and getting worse. According to Johns Hopkins, an average of 12.2% of COVID-19 tests in Kansas came back positive last week. That figure has risen every week for the past month, leaving us farther and farther from the 5% threshold that the World Health Organization recommends before lifting restrictions on public gatherings. Deborah Birx, the top White House official in charge of COVID-19 response, said this during an Aug. 15 visit to KCK:

“Kansas has rising test positivity. This is the moment to get it under control. Wear a mask. Close bars. Decrease indoor dining. Increase outdoor dining. Every single person needs to commit to not having parties and family gatherings that are going to spread this virus.”

Bonus: The extra content this week takes us back to Michael Austin, the former Brownback Administration economist who is adamantly opposed to mask mandates. Last week Austin pulled apart a chart from the state health department to show at a glance that Kansas counties without a mask mandate had lower overall COVID-19 rates than counties with a mandate. But in the process he also showed quite clearly that COVID-19 rates dropped after counties enacted mask mandates and the rates have held steady in the counties that didn't.

This week Austin was back with a new chart that showed that COVID-19 cases initially rose in the counties with mask mandates and didn't start dropping until about a week after the mandates went into effect.

Thanks to KORA, we have evidence @GovLauraKelly allowed @SecNorman to rig not only THE LEVEL of #COVID19 cases in their favor but also THE TREND.

Norman HID the fact mask counties had a 112% COVID case JUMP so he could say mask counties had a 38% DECLINE. #ksleg pic.twitter.com/L9YhyCdzei

— Michael Austin (@KSTaxEconomist) August 14, 2020

What Austin left out was that the novel coronavirus has an incubation rate of up to 14 days. So the effects of any intervention — including mask mandates — will never be seen immediately, because exposures from before the intervention will cause infections for weeks afterwards.

Indeed, in the graph Austin made (above, at right), the entire "112% JUMP" that he trumpets happens within the incubation period. 

Look closer and with more context and you see that he's actually made quite a strong case for mask mandates with this latest chart. The Kansas mandate went into effect July 3 for the counties that adopted it. According to the latest available data, the median incubation period for COVID-19 is 7.7 days, meaning a majority of infections won't have shown up until eight days after exposure. Eight days after July 3 would be July 11. Look at what day the infection rate starts to drop precipitously on Austin's chart: July 12.

Let me say that again: The median incubation period for a COVID-19 infection is about eight days. And Austin's chart shows that the COVID-19 infection rate begins to drop nine days after the mask mandate. 

In his rush to accuse the Kansas governor and health secretary of misleading people about the effectiveness of wearing masks, it was actually Austin who was misleading people (either willfully, to score cheap political points, or simply through his ignorance of COVID-19). In his zeal to show mask mandates don't effectively reduce COVID-19 transmission, he once again inadvertently provided pretty compelling evidence that they do. 

Unfortunately, a right-wing website called "The Sentinel" picked up Austin's fatally flawed analysis and ran with it. Like Austin, the site failed to mention that a COVID-19 incubation period even exists. That raises serious questions about the site's editorial standards and level of intellectual honesty. But if you want to address those questions to the people who bankroll the site, good luck: they're anonymous.

So if you see anyone passing around Austin's chart on social media as evidence that the Kansas mask mandate didn't work, explain to them the incubation period, and how it actually makes the chart a strong argument in favor of mask mandates.