Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 58

It's a rough time in Kansas City's hospitals. Our ICUs hit a new record for COVID-19 patients this week, 224. That's even more than during the winter surge. Exhausting. The good news is that new hospital admissions for COVID appear to be slowing. It will take time for that to provide relief, however, because COVID hospitalizations tend to last awhile. Other data this week is kind of hard to parse.

The Good: Test positivity fell from 38.8% to 34.4%, according to Johns Hopkins. That's obviously still too high (fourth-highest in the country behind Oklahoma, Iowa and Idaho) but at least moving in the right direction. 

The (maybe) Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, rose from 1.0 to 1.3 this week... maybe. That's according to the Rt website I've been using, and I want to be consistent with my data sources, but I have my doubts about that number, because new cases in Kansas seem to have leveled off since hitting a high of about 1,600 on Aug. 16. If the Rt were really 1.3, we would expect new cases to be rising fairly steadily.  Another Rt calculating website has Kansas at 0.94, which seems more indicative of what new cases are doing. If Rt is really 1.3 (or even close to 1.3) that is obviously bad. If it's actually 0.94, that's mildly good.

The Ugly: Statewide ICU capacity numbers are a little hard to come by this week because the Kansas Hospital Association has blacked them out with a message that says "Reporting is paused on these elements to allow hospitals to review their data submissions." I don't know what that's about. The good news is that total COVID hospitalizations statewide only rose from 728 to 731 this week. The bad news is, that's still pretty high. Wichita's major hospitals are both still at ICU capacity and their COVID hospitalizations rose from 147 to 177.  Topeka's COVID hospitalizations have leveled off at about 74 or 75, which is high for them, but fortunately not still rising. As mentioned earlier, Kansas City's hospitals are in a bad spot, especially on the Missouri side of the state line. The metro's Kansas hospitals had about 21% of their ICU beds available as of Aug. 25, but its Missouri hospitals were down to about 11%, which is pretty dire. On the Missouri side, fully 41% of all ICU beds were being used by COVID patients, which is truly staggering for a single diagnosis. Hopefully this is the worst it's going to get for our hospitals.

Bonus: I penned this op-ed for the Kansas City Star.