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.