Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 50

Cases are still decreasing slightly in Kansas, but they're now rising in nearly all the surrounding states, including Missouri, which is now recording new case levels not seen since February. That will eventually have a spillover effect here. In fact, some border counties are already seeing slight increases, including Johnson County, which has more vaccine protection than most. The Delta variant is here, and those who are unvaccinated will be vulnerable.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, dropped from 0.96 to 0.94. Always have to take this number with a grain of salt, because we've never done adequate testing. But it's good when Rt goes down. Here's the concerning part: look at this map. Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska all now have an Rt above 1.0, which means cases are increasing there. That's trouble for Kansas, especially during the summer travel season. 

The Bad: Hospital capacity fell a bit, from 39% to 37% this week, according to KDHE. That is still enough, but the number of patients hospitalized with COVID continues to climb, albeit slowly. The number in ICU does not seem to be rising proportionately lately, though, which is a good sign. Fewer infections are resulting in life-threatening illness.

The Ugly: Test positivity remained at 10.6%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's fourth-worst in the country, behind Arkansas, Idaho and Oklahoma (Missouri was fifth at 10.2%).

Bonus: An Associated Press analysis of data found that in May only about 1,200 of the country's 853,000 people hospitalized with COVID had been fully vaccinated (that's roughly 0.1%). Only 150 of the 18,000 Americans who died of COVID had been fully vaccinated (that's less than 1%). Hard to know for sure, but it's possible that all or nearly all of those 150 people were taking medications or had underlying medical conditions that made their immune systems less likely to mount a robust response to the vaccine. The vaccines are not foolproof, but they are nearly foolproof. Nearly everyone who is being hospitalized or dying from COVID right now is unvaccinated. That's it. That's the bottom line.  

Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 49

It's a bit of an odd time in Kansas, as far as COVID goes. We seem to be pretty stable at about 100 new cases per day, which is manageable, but not ideal (ideal would obviously be moving toward zero at this point, like Vermont, where more than 80% of ALL residents are now vaccinated, and there are only TWO people hospitalized with COVID in the entire state). But test positivity is still high here, so we might be missing some cases, and  COVID hospitalizations have risen a bit of late. And then there's Missouri, which is looking more concerning by the day.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, fell from 0.97 to 0.96 this week. That's good, but needs to be taken with a grain of salt, given the deficiencies in testing. A one-hundredth of a point difference could just be a function of undiagnosed cases.

The Bad: The Kansas Hospital Association didn't update its COVID dashboard this week, so I'll have to pull hospital data from KDHE. That data shows 39% ICU capacity available statewide, which is good. But it also shows slight increases (roughly 15%) in both COVID-related hospitalizations and ICU admissions last week. Not a good trend. Confirmed cases aren't going up, but hospitalizations are, which either means we're missing some cases, or the cases that are occurring now are more severe, and therefore more likely to require hospitalization (which could be the case if, as speculated, the new Delta variant that's now circulating causes a rougher form of the illness).

The Ugly: Test positivity fell from 11.2% to 10.6%, according to Johns Hopkins. But it went down more in other states. In fact, Kansas now has the highest rate in the country, at least as Johns Hopkins calculates it (some folks on social media have pointed out that the way that Hopkins calculates test positivity tends to result in a significantly higher rate than the way that state and local governments in Kansas calculate it. This is true. But it's still useful for comparing one state to another, and right now Kansas doesn't compare well). 

Bonus: Missouri is increasingly looking like a problem. Rural counties with low vaccination rates are encountering the Delta variant (and others) and the result is that new cases were up about 10% statewide last week, even as they kept plunging in metro areas like KC. The discrepancy here is not complicated: it's about vaccination rates. All things being equal, urban counties with much greater population density should be more susceptible to outbreaks than rural counties. But what we're seeing is the exact opposite. And that's because most urban and suburban counties have so far vaccinated a higher percentage of their residents. Unfortunately, the virus doesn't respect county lines, so the outbreaks happening in Missouri's low-vaccination areas are likely to spread, especially as we get into the heart of the summer travel season. 

Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 48

Overall things are looking pretty good in Kansas this week, although there are still some things to keep an eye on. New cases are up to 977 from 803 the week before, according to Kansas Hospital Association data. But the 803 week may have been an aberration because fewer tests were run (or analyzed) over the holiday weekend. Taking the longer view, 977 is still fewer new cases than we had any other week in the past year.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, dropped from 0.99 to 0.97. Not a huge drop, but heading in the right direction. 

The Bad: Hospital ICU capacity statewide fell from 33% to 32%, but that's not really the bad part. The bad part is that the number of Kansans hospitalized with COVID rose from 107 to 114. No, that's not a huge jump. And our hospitals can definitely handle it. But any increase in COVID hospitalizations right now just seems tragically unnecessary. Not to mention something to keep an eye on. Hospitalizations are also on the rise in southwest Missouri. The CEO of CoxHealth, a hospital chain I mentioned last week, tweeted this week that his facilities are now treating 52 COVID patients — up from 16 just a few weeks ago.

The Ugly: Test positivity fell from 12.6% to 11.2% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. This bolsters my hypothesis that the reason we had fewer new cases the week before was a lack of testing. We tested more this week, and identified more new cases.  It's good that we're testing more, but 11.2% is still too high (it's the second-highest rate in the country, behind only Idaho).

Bonus: The foremost COVID hotspot in the United States of America is now a couple of small, adjoining counties in northern Missouri — Livingston and Linn. The virus doesn't respect county lines, so we can expect the outbreak there to seed more cases in the region. In fact, if you look at the New York Times' COVID map, it's clear that several other surrounding counties are now seeing elevated case numbers as well. None of those counties are likely to have many ICU beds, which means the sickest patients there will be sent elsewhere. Given their location, most of them will probably end up in Kansas City (or maybe Omaha). It's something else to keep an eye on. Vaccination has put a certain lid on the pandemic from here on out, but vaccination rates remain low in many counties (especially rural areas), so the lid there will be higher. 

Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 47

 

The numbers haven't changed much this week. We're still at a relatively low level of COVID spread, but not going down very quickly (meanwhile nationwide cases have now fallen to their lowest level since the start of the pandemic in March 2020). Things are going relatively well in Kansas, but there are a couple regional trouble spots to keep an eye on, both inside the state and nearby.

The Good: Hospital ICU capacity was up from 30% availability to 33% this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. Every region of the state had at least 23% of beds available. There were only 107 COVID-19 patients in Kansas hospitals as of June 2, and only 35 of them were in ICU. The low hospitalization numbers come even as new cases are relatively stagnant, which is more evidence that most of the new cases now are in younger people who are less likely to be vaccinated. While COVID hospitalizations are rare among younger people, they do happen. In fact, a recent CDC study found that COVID hospitalizations among teens were actually on the rise in March and April, when they were falling in basically every other age demographic. With vaccines now available to everyone 12 and up, hopefully we can change that.

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate (Rt) fell this week, but only from 1.0 to 0.99. That's still one of the highest rates in the country (for comparison's sake, the rate in Vermont is 0.46, which will speed that state toward complete elimination of the virus in relatively short order). A rate of 0.99 puts us in the range where total active cases will decline extremely slowly, and could soon start rising again.

The Ugly: Test positivity was up this week from 12.0% to 12.6%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's third-highest in the country, behind Alabama and Idaho.   

Bonus: Here's where to watch: southwest Kansas and southwest Missouri. According to the Kansas Hospital Association's data, new COVID cases are going down in most regions of the state. But they're going up in southwest Kansas, and they're going up fast. New cases bottomed out at 39 there the week of May 12. They've risen every week since — to 47, 116 and now 194. That suggests possible exponential spread there. I would avoid that region if unvaccinated or at risk of complications.

Southwest Missouri is also showing some signs of trouble. The CEO of CoxHealth, one of the predominant hospital systems there, tweeted this week that the number of COVID patients in his facilities was hovering between 35 and 40, which was 2.5 times higher than two weeks ago. Meanwhile, the percentage of symptomatic CoxHealth patients testing positive for COVID was almost 20%, up from about 5% just three weeks earlier. That's cause for concern. Several parts of Missouri could long remain incubators for COVID, given that the state is among the bottom 15 in the country for COVID vaccination rate, with a little over 42% of the population receiving at least one dose. Cases in Missouri were actually UP about 10% last week — the only state where that was the case. What happens in Missouri doesn't stay in Missouri. It will inevitably affect Kansas as well.