Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 59

Took last week off while camping for the holiday weekend. Here's the state of play: Our hospitals are jammed, they're about as overworked as they've ever been since the start of the pandemic. The good news is that new cases seem to have leveled off (and are even trending down in KC), but it will be at least another week or two before that translates into any relief for hospital workers. Right now, anyone who needs critical care in Kansas for any reason, COVID or not, is in danger of having that care compromised. 

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, is down to 1.0 statewide. Two weeks ago it was clocking in at 1.3, but I had doubts about the accuracy of that figure. Considering new cases have stabilized, 1.0 seems more indicative of where we really are.

The Bad: Test positivity was 31.5% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's actually down from 34.4% two weeks ago, but still way too high, and it makes it hard to know just how many new cases we're missing. Only Idaho and Iowa are higher. 

The Ugly: The Kansas Hospital Association is still graying out data on hospital ICU capacity statewide, but what's available from the state's two big medical hubs isn't encouraging. Wichita's hospitals are still over their normal capacity, and the number of COVID patients in ICUs there (73) is the highest it's been since Dec. 21 (and not far off the all-time record of 88). Kansas City's situation is also quite concerning. The metro's 27 hospitals were down to about 6.5% ICU capacity on Sept. 10, and the previous trend of things being worse on the Missouri side of the state line has now reversed as the outbreak moves steadily westward. ICUs on the Missouri side were just short of 11% capacity, while ICUs on the Kansas side were down to 1.2%. That's not a typo. There were a total of three ICU beds available on the entire Kansas side of the metro. Can't keep that up, obviously. 

Bonus: I don't know what could possibly be said at this point to convince vaccine-resistant folks to change their minds. You would think the fact that 90% of COVID patients in the hospital are unvaccinated would do it. But I know there are still some people who have real concerns about the safety of the vaccines and even believe they might be more risky than the actual disease, even though all data points the opposite direction (at least for everybody 16 and up). If you know somebody like that, perhaps this one story out of an Iowa prison will help:

Back in April, 77 inmates at the prison were shot up with six times the recommended dosage of the Pfizer vaccine due to a medical error (prison health care is notoriously bad in most states, but that's a whole other story). The nurses who made the error were fired, but the more interesting thing is what happened to those prisoners next: nothing. Some of them felt mildly ill, just like some people who get the recommended vaccine dose. Others felt fine. None had to be hospitalized. None had residual health problems. Think about that: 77 prisoners — a group that is significantly less healthy, statistically, than the U.S. population at large — got SIX TIMES the vaccine dose everyone else gets AND THEY WERE TOTALLY FINE! How in the world would that be possible if there were any real, systemic danger from the vaccine?  

Oh and, by the way, masks work. A huge, well-constructed study by a group of U.S. academics in Bangladesh confirms it. Surgical masks in particular, work well to reduce COVID transmission. Which makes sense, given that surgeons have been wearing them for decades to protect their patients from airborne pathogens.