Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 36

This week's post is going to be brief because, well, there's a lot of college basketball on TV and everything looks pretty good in Kansas right now. That's not to say we should get complacent — COVID-19 cases are actually rising in 14 other states (including my home state of MN) right now and the new, more contagious variants are showing up more and more often in the U.S. (meanwhile COVID is still absolutely ravaging other countries, like Brazil and parts of Europe, which raises the specter of even more variants emerging because every infection is a chance for more mutations). But every week like this buys us more time to get more shots in arms and keep Kansas from experiencing another month like December or January.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate ticked down again, from 0.87 to 0.86. Not a huge drop, but it's moving the right direction and plenty low enough to keep the number of active cases from rising. Hospital ICU capacity was up significantly, from 28% to 34% statewide (with 92% of hospitals reporting), according to the Kansas Hospital Association. The fullest region was south-central Kansas, at 22% capacity available. The statewide test positivity rate dropped from 13.6% to 11.6%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's still fourth-worst in the country, but an encouraging week-to-week improvement. When new cases and test positivity are both declining at the same time, we can be pretty confident that we're truly reducing the number of infectious people out there in our state (and not just testing less). 

The Bad and/or Ugly: There is none! Let's watch some hoops.