Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 53

Our months-long reprieve is over. New cases are still going up, and now hospitalizations are too. Missouri's COVID outbreak has come to Kansas, both directly (the surge in infections spilling over from southwest Missouri to southeast Kansas) and indirectly (the ripple effect of full hospitals sending patients to Kansas City). Our hospital capacity statewide is still in good shape, but the vaccination rate in Kansas is only nominally better than in Missouri. It's quite possible that some under-vaccinated areas of Kansas will be clobbered just as badly as Springfield, Mo., is now. The excellent science journalist Ed Yong recently wrote this piece about what it's like there. I recommend reading the whole thing, but this quote, from the medical director of CoxHealth, is perhaps the most important part for people who live in the KC area, where hospitalizations are up:  “Now we’re blasting (patients) outward,” Coulter said. “We’re already saturating the surrounding hospitals.”

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, or Rt, remained at 1.1. That qualifies as good news this week. It means that active cases are still rising, but they're not rising any faster than the week before. Of course, that depends on us testing enough to actually know how many cases there are. Which isn't happening. 

The Bad: Hospital ICU capacity fell from 37% to 35% this week, according to KDHE. But the really bad part is what's lurking behind those numbers. Total COVID hospitalizations rose from 143 on July 7 to 270 by July 14. Yes, that's almost double. We don't know yet how many of those people will eventually need ICU-level care, but certainly a chunk of them will. And cases in ICU are already up from 51 last week to 73 this week. Not good.

The Ugly: The precipitous rise in hospitalizations likely signals that we're missing a lot of cases at the pre-hospitalization phase, when they're pre-symptomatic or showing only mild symptoms. Because we're not testing enough. Test positivity rose from 23.8% to 26.5% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's going from bad to worse.

Bonus: The CDC warned this week that the COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to work as well for people who are immunocompromised because of medical conditions or medications. This is logical, and the real-world data to back it up has been building for months now, but the CDC has been typically deliberate about making any definitive statements about it (which is not necessarily a bad thing — good science is often slow). What this means is that vaccination is not just a personal choice. If you choose not to be vaccinated, you're putting at risk people who are in cancer treatments, or have had organ transplants, even if they personally made a different choice. We need each other to beat the virus. Immunocompromised people are relying on the rest of us to get vaccinated, because it makes us far less likely to pass the virus to them. If you won't get vaccinated for your own benefit, please, PLEASE, consider doing it as a favor to your immunocompromised neighbors.