Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 8

 

Not a lot of good news this week. A surge of COVID-19 throughout the Midwest has affected Kansas (though not quite as bad as Iowa and the Dakotas), and the state is now 11th nationally in per capita new cases. Let's hope Labor Day doesn't make things worse.

The Good: Hospital ICU capacity still holding steady at 38% availability as of Sept. 3 with 122 hospitals reporting. Again, that number hasn't changed much in the last month or two. But hospitalizations are a lagging indicator, which means if we have a surge of cases it won't show up in the hospitalization numbers until a couple weeks later. 

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, is up... substantially. It went from 1.06 to 1.10 last week. Which means each infection is causing more subsequent infections than before. We're spreading COVID-19 too much in Kansas. That doesn't bode well as kids prepare to go back to school.

The Ugly: Last week's drop in test positivity appears to have been a blip, as I feared. Possibly caused by widespread surveillance testing at colleges, in particular KU, which tested more than 20,000. This week, as we returned to our normal volume of testing, the test positivity rate jumped from 11.4 to 17.3. That's the fifth-worst nationwide and a truly discouraging number. I know it seems like a broken record, but we need more testing.