Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 22

Kansas has recorded yet another 500 COVID-19 deaths, this time in about 2.5 weeks. It took six months (from March 11 to Sept 11) for Kansas to record its first 500 deaths. It took about six weeks (from Sept. 12 to Oct. 28) to record another 500. Then four weeks (from Oct. 29 to Nov. 23) to record yet another 500. Two weeks ago I predicted Kansas would top 2,000 total COVID deaths by Christmas. We got there two weeks earlier. Now it looks like we will top 2,500 deaths by Christmas. It's easy to get numb to all this death. But we're losing dozens of Kansans a day to COVID and each of them has a family that loves them dearly.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, or Rt, dropped to 1.01 last week. That's a good number that suggests the Thanksgiving surge could be short. We're almost to the point where cases would start to decline. We desperately need an extended period of declining cases.  

The Bad: ICU capacity remains stubbornly low, at 17% statewide as of Dec. 11, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. That's about the same as last week, and persistently full ICUs are likely playing a role in the large number of deaths. Some of the Kansans in those beds probably would have survived if we hadn't spread our medical system so thin. 

The Ugly: Test positivity was 37.1% in Kansas this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's better than the week before, but still awful. It's the fourth-worst rate in the country, behind Idaho, South Dakota and Pennsylvania. 

Bonus: When the pandemic first came to Kansas it came mostly to the urban areas. But for the last few months it's been overwhelmingly a more rural disease — so much so that the rural parts of the state have now borne a much greater overall disease burden than the urban parts. In past weeks I've occasionally shared a "heat map" that shows which areas of the state are recording the most NEW cases per capita. That's useful because it tells you where the virus is spreading right now. But here's a map that shows which counties have recorded the most CUMULATIVE cases per capita, going all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic. 

It's striking, isn't it? You can see that the pandemic has hit hard in Wyandotte County, but nearly every other "deep red" county is rural. The coronavirus has ravaged basically the entire western third of the state, and many of those cases have come in just the last few months. Early on in the pandemic, that part of the state was largely COVID-free, except for some outbreaks in meat packing plants, prisons and nursing homes, where chains of infection were easy to identify and contain. But in the last few months that part of the state has witnessed persistent, out-of-control community spread.

It's had devastating consequences for a lot of families out there, too. Here's another heat map, this one depicting cumulative COVID deaths per capita since the beginning of the pandemic. 

As a proportion of their population, rural counties have now become much more acquainted with death-due-to-COVID than their urban counterparts. In fact, tiny Gove County, Kansas (population 2,600), has had more COVID deaths per capita than anywhere else in the country. And yet, those counties are much less likely to require residents to wear masks. Gove County's government approved a mask mandate in August, but then repealed it almost immediately amid intense anger from locals (someone apparently even threatened to blow up one county commissioner's house). Even in rural places where masks are technically required, like Dodge City, resistance to wearing them remains high. It is sad, but I'm not sure what it will take to get those attitudes to change. An awful lot of death in a relatively short period of time hasn't done it yet.