Kansas COVID-19 Update, Week 79

 

Things continue to trend in the right direction, increasing my confidence that we're now on the back end of the omicron surge. New cases are trending down, and we saw our first real dip in hospitalizations in a long time this week. But overall hospitalizations remain high, so it's not time to declare victory yet.

The Good: Test positivity dropped again this week, from 36.8% to 29.8%, according to Johns Hopkins. Kansas remains sixth-worst in the country in this metric, but that's two straight weeks of substantial decline. 

The Not Bad: The infection reproduction rate, Rt, fell from 1.1 to 1.0 this week. I would love to see a bigger decline, but if this is accurate, it at least means that we're stable now. I still expect to see this number below 1.0 soon, given that both new cases and test positivity are declining.

The Still-Bad-But-Getting-Better: COVID-19 hospitalizations have fallen in Kansas, but they've only fallen from about as high as they've ever been (1,250) to almost as high as they've ever been. I doubt hospital workers are feeling much relief yet. Here's the breakdown:

• Statewide COVID hospitalizations fell from 1,243 to 1,091 this week, according to the Kansas Hospital Association.
• Statewide cases in ICU fell from 250 to 236. 
• COVID hospitalizations in the Wichita area fell from 294 to 272, and cases in ICU fell from 72 to 67.
• COVID hospitalizations in the KC area (bistate) fell from 1,224 to 1,116 and cases in ICU fell from 220 to 211. 
• Overall ICU availability in the KC area rose from about 13.7%, to about 14.3%.  Regular hospital beds were at about 16% capacity available, which is also only a very slight increase from last week. Bed space is still pretty tight. Need to get above 20% before hospitals have any real breathing room.