Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 7

 

This week's summary will be short and sweet, in part because two of my three key metrics are largely the same.

The Good: The test positivity rate in Kansas last week was 11.4%, according to Johns Hopkins. Now, normally having 11.4% of your state's COVID-19 tests come back positive would not qualify as "good" by any stretch of the imagination (it should be 5% or less to be reasonably confident you're testing enough to identify most cases). But this is all about context. Kansas' test positivity rate has been increasing steadily since I started this blog almost two months ago and topped out at 12.8% last week. Any change in that trajectory is very welcome. One caveat about last week's numbers, though: the University of Kansas recorded nearly 21,800 tests as it prepared to welcome students back to campus. It's very possible that was enough to bring down the test positivity for the entire state, given how little the state has been testing. We'll have to wait and see whether this is a true downward trend or just a one-week blip.

The Bad: The reproduction rate (Rt) was 1.06 in Kansas as of Aug. 29. That's the same as it was the week before, but it still qualifies as "bad" because the longer that number stays above 1.0, the more cases we will end up with. If it's below 1.0, and it stays the same, that's good. If it's above 1.0 and staying the same, that's bad — especially as kids start going back to school, because gatherings tend to increase the Rt.

The Neutral: Nothing "ugly" this week, thankfully. Once again, hospital ICU capacity held steady at about 37% availability (with 120 hospitals reporting). It's remarkable how stable that number has been over the last month or so.