Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 68

The general pattern of the past month continues to hold. New cases remain high in Kansas, but not as high as they were in August or September, and they're not really increasing or decreasing much at all. I hope this is not the new normal. We're still averaging about 20 COVID deaths per week as a state, which would be more than 1,000 a year. While that's certainly a lot better than the first 12 months of the pandemic, when we suffered about four or five times that many deaths, it still seems like a pretty high price to pay. Hopefully vaccines for kids 5-11 will help reduce transmission.

The Good: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, fell from 1.0 to 0.96 this week.  The caveat to that is that getting a really precise Rt number relies on having robust testing in place, and there's ample evidence we aren't testing near enough in Kansas. 

The Bad: COVID hospitalizations statewide barely budged this week, going from 402 to 393, according to the Kansas Hospital Association. Cases in Wichita's hospitals fell from 113 to 102, but cases in ICU there actually rose from 48 to 51 and those hospitals remain over their normal ICU capacity. ICU capacity in the Kansas City area is also slightly more pinched, going from 22.5% to 18% this week. 

The Ugly: Test positivity rose from 33% to 37% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's third-worst in the nation behind Iowa and Idaho. Only five states are currently running fewer weekly tests per capita than Kansas. Four states (Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Illinois) are each running at least 10 times more. That's why I can't be super confident about that Rt dip. 

Bonus: Children are at lower risk for severe COVID-19 than adults, but sadly some do get very ill from it, and some even die. We have seen it happen right here in Kansas, including again this week, with our sixth pediatric death of the pandemic. It's important to know that the new vaccine approved for kids 5-11 is a lower dose specially formulated for that age group. In clinical trials it provided robust protection (because kids that age have very responsive immune systems) without any evidence of the rare side effects (myocarditis) observed in some (mostly young men) who received the adult dosage. In fact, so far no serious side effects of any kind have been observed in the trial participants. It's a smaller sample size than the clinical trials for the adult vaccine, but so far the kids' dose looks extremely safe and effective.