Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 30

 

Kansas passed 4,000 COVID-19 deaths this week (the state has confirmed 4,101 as of Feb. 5). The new deaths include, especially tragically, a 6-year-old. We passed 1,000 deaths in late October, we passed 2,000 by Dec. 12, and we passed 3,000 the week of Jan. 9. So the pace of deaths has leveled off, but we're barely at the downturn. Still, there are several signs that a precipitous drop is finally coming.

The Good: Hospital ICU capacity improved from 22% to 29% this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. That's an excellent jump. This is the last step before deaths start to really drop: more empty ICU beds. 

The Not-bad: The reproduction rate, or Rt, dropped from 1.0 to 0.98. I'd like to see a bigger decrease, but this new site where I'm pulling the data from seems fairly conservative in its estimates, and an 0.98 still means that total infections are decreasing.  

The Bad: Test positivity in Kansas dropped from 25.7% to 24.3% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. It's barely moving, which gives us some room to doubt just how much new cases are really decreasing (we're clearly missing a lot of cases, we just don't know how many. This is why it's hard to pin down an Rt). However, based on our improving hospitalization figures, they clearly are decreasing. Only Alabama and Idaho currently have worse test positivity numbers than Kansas.