Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 10

 

Kansas lawmakers are talking about using tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to dramatically increase COVID-19 testing in the state. This would be helpful not only for diagnosing more COVID-19 and isolating people to keep from spreading, but also for creating more robust data to show how we're doing at controlling the spread. Until then, here are the numbers as best we know them.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate (Rt) ticked down a notch from 1.03 to 1.02. It's looking more and more like the Week 8 spike up to 1.10 was an anomaly. But we're still just a bit short of getting Rt below 1.0, which would transition us from an outbreak in which cases are slowly increasing, to one in which cases are slowly tapering off. 

The Bad: Hospital ICU capacity in Kansas, which had been slowly growing for several weeks, dropped down from 39% on Sept. 9 to 35% on Sept. 17. Interestingly, though, it looks like the loss of capacity was not due to COVID-19 cases, which were steady. People must have been ending up in ICU beds for other reasons. It's too early for flu season, and I can't think of any other cyclical or systemic event that would lead to an increase in ICU admissions. So my guess is this is another anomaly and probably not too worrisome.

The Ugly: Test positivity. It just stays stubbornly, discouragingly high. In Week 9 it was 14.6%, which was actually an improvement from the ghastly 17.3% the week before. This week it ticked back up to 15.1%. Remember, we're shooting for 5% or less, which is very possible. Half the states are there already.  But Kansas tied Alabama this week for the fifth-highest positivity rate in the country. Only South Dakota, Wisconsin, Idaho and Mississippi were worse. We need lots more testing, including regular surveillance testing at nursing homes, schools and workplaces, which is supposed to be part of the aforementioned ramp-up effort using federal funds. That effort can't come soon enough.