Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 56

Well, the badness that I had feared was coming last week has come this week instead. With the exception of test positivity, all of the trends are going the wrong direction. Delta-variant COVID is moving like a wave from Missouri and Oklahoma into Kansas, and hospitals in Kansas City and Wichita are already feeling it. I'm still hopeful that we will eventually see a steep drop in new infections, like India and the UK did after their Delta surges. But in those countries the drop didn't start until after about two months of rising infections. The Delta variant first started showing up in KC wastewater in late June (which is, not coincidentally, when the current surge started).  That means we could have several more weeks of rising infections ahead of us, and maybe another month of rising hospitalizations (because hospitalizations lag infections). That's daunting.

The Good: Test positivity fell from 33.7% to 21.8%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's a significant drop, and makes me suspicious it might be some sort of data error. The only other explanation I can think of is that more non-symptomatic people are getting tested now before they start school/college, but it seems a bit early for that. For whatever reason, we definitely are testing more now. According to Hopkins, Kansas is reporting more than twice as many average daily tests (almost 150 per 100,000 people) than we were on July 27 (68 per 100,000). 

The Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, rose from 1.2 to 1.3 this week. Cases are not only continuing to grow, but they're growing faster now. However, if the test positivity numbers are right, part of the reason for the increase might be that we're identifying more infections than we were before because we're testing more. 

The Ugly: Hospital ICU capacity went from 25% to 22% statewide this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. A deeper dive into the data shows real danger zones. In the medical hubs of Wichita and Kansas City, ICU capacity was down to 16% and 17%, respectively, this week. The state's largest hospitals are already feeling crunched. If you look at the MARC website you can see that the problem is more acute on the Missouri side of the KC metro. On Wednesday (the most recent day that all of the area hospitals reported their data), the 10 facilities on the Kansas side had about 21% of their ICU beds available, with 20% taken up by COVID patients. The 17 facilities on the Missouri side had about 11% of ICU beds available with 35% occupied by COVID patients. The wave is moving westward from central Missouri and has already basically smothered the KCMO hospitals. The ripple effect is now moving through the KCK and Johnson County facilities. COVID patients in Kansas hospitals rose from 415 to 526 this week, an increase that was more than double that of the week before. 

Bonus: This video from a doctor in New Orleans (which is also being hit hard by Delta) is worth watching. If your hospitals are full, it's bad for everybody, vaccinated or not.