Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 21

 

After a brief dip in new cases, COVID-19 is once again on the march in the Kansas City area and the state of Kansas. We are experiencing the predicted Thanksgiving surge (following the incubation period), and can expect another week or two of increasing infections until they hopefully start to level off and go down again. Then we'll have to deal with the Christmas surge. No good news in the data this week.

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, ticked up from 1.05 to 1.07. That means each infection now causes, on average, 1.07 more. So while it may not look like a huge jump, it translates to a LOT more infections because we're starting from like 3,000 per day. We really need this number under 1.0. But Thanksgiving gatherings made an increase predictable. Hopefully it's temporary.

The Worse: ICU capacity fell from 21% last week to 16% on December 4, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. After a brief respite, we're back down to where we were two weeks ago. The Wichita area continues to be particularly strained, with just 5% of ICU beds remaining. And remember, Wichita's hospitals have already put in place their "surge" protocols and added extra ICU beds. They've been above their normal ICU capacity for more than a month. Now they're also bumping up against their surge capacity. It's a very difficult time to be a hospital worker or a patient in Wichita. 

The Ugly: Test positivity in the state rose from 38.1% to 46.6%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's third-worst in the country behind Idaho and South Dakota. It's a terrible number and it suggests that new infections are rising even faster than we currently think they are because many are going unidentified.

Bonus: I don't know what more can be done to convince people to wear masks, or to convince political leaders to require masks. We now have much better mask coverage in Kansas than we did just a month ago, thanks to Gov. Kelly's second mask order. But there are still dozens of mask-free counties in the state. Many of them are in western Kansas. Here's an updated heat map that shows where the most new cases, per capita, are being recorded.

To be clear, the yellow and orange counties aren't great. We could use more greens. But look where all the red is. Those counties are major COVID incubators. That affects the whole state, because the virus doesn't respect county lines and hospital patients are routinely transferred across county lines. Hays Medical Center's medical director said this week that nearly all of her hospital's COVID-19 cases come from counties that don't require masks.

I get that all counties are different and I'm a fan of local control for a lot of things. But viral pandemics aren't one of them. Ideally we should have a cohesive national strategy for containing COVID-19, but in the absence of that we should at least have a cohesive statewide strategy, especially given that the coronavirus is now endemic in every region of the state. The county-by-county patchwork approach is making things worse.

A binding statewide mask mandate would still help. In North Dakota, Gov. Doug Burgum instituted one on Nov. 13, after months of resistance. A Carnegie Mellon survey of Facebook users showed that the percentage of North Dakotans who reported wearing a mask rose to almost 90% after Burgum's order (it had been under 70% about a month earlier). Active COVID-19 infections have been cut almost in half there since the order.  

Now that's just one state and masks are just one factor (Burgum also ordered bars and restaurants to limit capacity to 50% and close at 10 p.m.). But it's yet another data point in a long and growing list that shows that masks reduce the spread of COVID-19 — with virtually no downside to those who are required to wear them. It's senseless that there are still dozens of counties in Kansas where people can gather, indoors, without wearing them.