Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 13

 

There was another spike in COVID-19 ICU hospitalizations in Kansas this week. It's not quite as high as the one two weeks ago, but still concerning, especially since overall capacity seems to have been more affected this time. Here's the weekly update:

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, or Rt, stayed at an estimated 1.01 this week. It's the third straight week at that number. We would prefer for it to be going down, rather than staying the same. But this is the best I can do in terms of silver linings this week: each infection doesn't seem to be causing more new infections than it did in weeks past. But once you get enough infections out in the community, any Rt number above 1.0 can cause significant problems. 

The Bad: One of those problems, eventually, will be overloaded hospitals, which we've previously seen in parts of New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Louisiana, Florida and Texas. We're not there yet in Kansas, but this past week was a step in the wrong direction. Kansas hospitals reported 119 patients in ICU because of COVID-19 on Oct. 8 (with 130 hospitals reporting). That was the second-highest number on record, trailing only the 121 from two weeks earlier. But while that previous spike didn't hurt overall capacity (ostensibly because fewer people were in ICUs for other reasons), this time it did. The percentage of ICU beds available in the state dropped from 37% the week before to 32% on Thursday. That's the lowest it's been since I started checking in early July, and flu season hasn't even started. So get your flu shot before the end of this month, and encourage everyone you know to get it too, unless you or they have a medical condition that precludes vaccination. 

The Ugly: It's always test positivity, it seems. It went up again this week, according to Johns Hopkins, rising to 16.2% in Kansas. That was fifth-worst in the nation, behind only Idaho, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Iowa. Twenty states (and DC) are below 5%, so it can be done. But it takes an awful lot of testing. 

Bonus: Our bonus this week comes courtesy of documents from the White House Coronavirus Task Force that were leaked to the Center for Public Integrity (don't ask me why the work product of a group of civil servants paid for with taxpayer money needs to be "leaked" to the public rather than just published). Task force documents from Oct. 4 show that the following Kansas counties were deemed in the "red zone" for having high numbers of COVID-19 cases per capita: Ford, Ellis, Finney, Crawford, Seward, Barton, Cherokee, Dickinson, Grant, Franklin, Pottawatomie, Thomas, Rooks, Stevens, Nemaha, Phillips, Cheyenne, Rawlins, Ness, Rush, Logan, Sherman, Sheridan, Gove, Marshall and Scott. That's most of southwest Kansas, a significant chunk of northwest Kansas, most of the area around Hays, a couple counties in southeast Kansas, a couple along the northern border with Nebraska (a state where hospital capacity is starting to become a real problem) and a couple near Fort Riley. The task force recommends that masks be worn in indoor public places throughout the state, but most of those red zone counties are quite rural and don't have any rules about mask wearing. Several urban counties that do have mask mandates fall into the task force's "orange zone" (Wyandotte) or "yellow zone" (Johnson, Sedgwick, Douglas, Shawnee). So masks aren't a panacea. But very few people are claiming that they are. Masks are an evidence-based way to reduce transmission of the novel coronavirus, at little to no cost to the wearer or society at large. Seems like a good trade.