Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 45

I know most people are done with the pandemic. Masks are coming off, crowds are gathering. I get it. The weather is nice and we've been at this for more than a year now. But the numbers suggest that the pandemic is not done with us here in Kansas. We only have about 35% of our state population (including kids) fully vaccinated, according to Johns Hopkins. I still think that's enough, combined with summer's seasonal dip in viral transmissions, to keep our hospitals in good shape, but I really hope we get a lot more people vaccinated by fall. Meanwhile we are still experiencing some COVID deaths (19 of them last week), most of which are entirely preventable at this point.

The Good: Hospital ICU availability was 30% statewide this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association (which is apparently back to updating its dashboard every week). That's plenty, and the lowest region was 21% (south-central region, of course), which is still solid. The one thing to watch, though: our low for number of people hospitalized with COVID was 228 in late March/early April. Every week since then it has remained steady at about 250-350 (it was 275 this week). It would be better, obviously, if it had kept going down.

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate rose from 0.94 to 0.96 this week. That still means overall cases are decreasing, but they're decreasing slowly and we're getting perilously close to the point at which our number of total active cases would be increasing again. There's really no reason for that to happen, given the effectiveness of the vaccines. But people have to get the vaccines for them to work. 

The Ugly: Test positivity rose from 11.2% to 13.3% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's the second worst in the country (behind Idaho) and wipes out all the gains we made in this category the week before. It is also means that the rise in the infection reproduction rate is probably accurate, and even may be underestimated, because there may be a bunch of infections out there that we're missing by not testing enough.