Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 76

 

I'm going to keep this short and sweet, because everything is bad. Now is not a good time to need hospital care, for any reason. 

The Bad: Test positivity in Kansas rose from 36.9% to 42.5% this week, according to Johns Hopkins. That's fourth-worst in the country, behind Alaska, New Jersey and Utah. 

The Worse: Things continue to get tougher for our hospitals:

• Statewide COVID hospitalizations are up from 987 to 1,128 this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association.
• Statewide cases in ICU rose from 242 to 271.
• COVID hospitalizations in the Wichita area rose from 209 to 253, while cases in ICU there rose from 62 to 77.
• COVID hospitalizations in the KC area (bistate) rose from 1,047 to 1,294 and cases in ICU there rose from 213 to 246. 
• Overall ICU availability in the KC area actually rose from 9.14% to 12.5% and the raw number of ICU beds available rose from 50 to 77. That means that there are fewer people in ICU for non-covid reasons this week, which gives KC hospitals a lucky bit of breathing room, but not any lasting relief.

The Ugly: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, soared from 1.1 to 2.7 this week. That's an enormous jump; definitely the biggest I've seen in Kansas from one week to the next. My hope is that this is a fluke of data — like maybe there were a lot of backed up tests during the holiday season that all got processed and reported in a big data dump this week. If not, then the virus is spreading incredibly fast in our area and our hospitals are in a very big bind.

Bonus: Amid all of this badness comes a new analysis that found that insurance companies and Medicare spent almost $130 million last year on ivermectin, a prescription drug that has not been proven to prevent or treat covid, but has nonetheless gained a rabid cult following among people who think it does (kind of like hydroxychloroquine in 2020). Ivermectin is extremely cheap by the pill and is usually only prescribed to treat very rare parasitic infections, so that huge price tag suggests that a whole lot of Americans have been taking it for covid (which, again, doesn't work, according to the published clinical evidence). Insurance companies don't have to cover these "off-label" uses, but it seems as though a lot of them have been because, again, ivermectin's pretty cheap on a per-pill basis so maybe not worth challenging each claim. In the grand scheme of America's total health care spending, $130 million is not a ton (though it's not chump change either). But that number still illustrates how much medical misinformation has taken hold of our population.