A chart showed COVID-19 daily case numbers in Kansas were declining. The last date on the chart is May 13, about six days ago, with the bars showing the start of illness. (KDHE chart)The rate of hospitalizations in Kansas from COVID-19 has been declining, through May 13. (KDHE chart)The rate of deaths in Kansas has generally declined, according to this chart from the KDHE. It was through May 13. More recent information showed the rate of deaths declining further. (KDHE chart)
Gov. Laura Kelly today announced that Kansas is moving into a modified Phase 2 of its reopening plan on this Friday, May 22, a few days earlier than expected.
The governor cited improving metrics and data on COVID-19 in the state as her reason for moving up the date. She made her remarks at a news conference on Tuesday.
Wyandotte County is currently not under the governor’s plan, but is under its own reopening plan, ReStart WyCo, which is stricter than the governor’s plan. It is scheduled to be in the “red zone” of the local plan until May 25, and it’s not certain when it will move into the next phase.
The governor made her announcement one day before she is scheduled to meet with President Trump at the White House, on Wednesday.
She said her decision was based on data that showed the rates were improving. The rate of deaths and hospitalizations have fallen in the state, and tests have increased, she said.
She added she is watching the metrics on disease spread, hospitalization and death rates, and availability of personal protective equipment.
She said she was encouraged by the state’s progress.
While Kansas is transitioning to Phase 2, it’s still a long way to go before arriving at anything bordering on normal, Gov. Kelly said.
She said everyone should continue to wear masks, wash their hands and stay home if sick or running a temperature. The threat is still present, especially if people are in the high-risk category, she said.
Even if they’re not at high risk, the events at Lake Perry earlier this month, when people gathered despite the “stay-at-home” order in effect, illustrate how things can spin rapidly out of control if people defy guidelines, she said. The gathering at Lake Perry led to at least 10 people falling ill, and at least 20 people being in quarantine. The situation was a sobering reminder of how the virus may spread and why social distancing is important, she said.
Gov. Kelly said nightclubs, bars and swimming pools will still be closed under this phase starting Friday, along with large entertainment venues of more than 2,000 people, fairs, festivals, parades, and summer camps that are not state licensed child care programs.
Reopening under the governor’s plan will be state-owned casinos if they comply with state guidelines, museums, bowling alleys, and organized sports practices that follow guidelines of the Kansas Recreational Park Association found at covid.ks.gov, she said.
In the state’s phase 2, mass gatherings of more than 15 people will be prohibited.
Wyandotte County is still under the “red zone” of the ReStart WyCo plan, and the reopening of these places in Wyandotte County will depend on the decision of the local health officer. The Unified Government Commission is scheduled to have an update on COVID-19 at Thursday night’s meeting.
Gov. Kelly said when she meets with the President on Wednesday, she will discuss the Kansas meatpacking plants and how they continued to keep the plants open while addressing positive cases of COVID-19 there. Kansas did not close down the plants, as some other states did. They brought in contact tracers and used other methods to keep the plants open.
Gov. Kelly also expects to address programs on mental health, she said. She said she plans to discuss speeding up the delivery of recovery funds from the federal government to state and local governments.
State and local governments need more federal funding to offset revenue losses they are experiencing because of COVID-19, she said.
Phase 2 will last until Sunday, June 7. Gov. Kelly said Phase 3 could start as early as June 8, moved up a week from its original date. She specifically mentioned only one death during the past weekend in the entire state as an improvement over the past few weeks.
Gov. Kelly has appointed a revitalization task force. The task force will have a five-member executive committee and on the task force will be public and private sector leaders, legislators, urban and rural representation.
The Strengthening People and Revitalizing Kansas (S.P.A.R.K.) task force is led by Cheryl Harrison-Lee, the Recovery Office’s executive director, and Lyle Butler, chair of the task force. Butler has worked with local Chambers of Commerce, retiring from the Manhattan Area Chamber of Commerce.
The task force steering committee includes two Wyandotte County leaders, Edward Honesty Jr., president and chief operating officer, Best Harvest Bakeries, Kansas City, Kansas; and State Rep. Kathy Wolfe Moore, D-36th Dist., Kansas City, Kansas, ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Committee.
The rate of COVID-19 disease spread in Wyandotte County has declined recently. This chart showed the daily case rate of new cases by the onset date, through May 13. (KDHE chart)
David C. Toland’s goal is for the Kansas Department of Commerce to move at the speed of business, not the speed of government.
Toland, who is secretary of the Kansas Commerce Department, was the featured speaker at the Congressional Forum Friday, May 15. Because of the coronavirus epidemic, the meeting was held as a teleconference. The forum is a committee of the Kansas City, Kansas, Area Chamber of Commerce.
Toland, who was appointed to the job by Gov. Laura Kelly last January, has been busy rebuilding the Commerce Department. He is filling positions that have been vacant for some time. Toland said the agency now has business recruiters in Chicago, Los Angles, Dallas, New York City and Springfield, Missouri. He said that Kansas is a good place to do business because of a lower operating cost and its central location. He also said the agency is recruiting in the international marketplace.
Toland praised Kansas banks for aggressively assisting the Paycheck Protection Program, an effort that the Small Business Administration directed. Kanas businesses received more than $5.1 billion that helped small businesses keep their employees during the downturn that the coronavirus caused.
Toland also praised the cooperative efforts of the Wyandotte Economic Development Council in its effort to help existing business and recruit new firms.
Toland’s appointment was not without controversy. He served as treasurer of Gov. Kelly’s election campaign committee. In March, conservative senators opposed his nomination because of his leadership of Thrive Allen County, a health advocacy and economic development agency in Iola, Kansas. Usually appointments by the governor face little opposition.
Kansans for Life, an anti-abortion organization, opposed Toland’s appointment. Thrive Allen County received a grant from the Dr. George Tiller Fund to help pregnant women stop smoking. Toland supporters stressed that none of the funds paid for abortion services.
Before coming to Iola, Toland worked for Mayor Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C., in planning and economic development positions.
Toland received his undergraduate degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Kansas at Lawrence. He is a seventh generation Kansan. He and his wife Beth, a KU alumna, are the parents of a daughter Caroline and a son William.
Murrel Bland is the former editor of The Wyandotte West and The Piper Press. He is the executive director of Business West.
Wyandotte County reported 1,173 positive COVID-19 cases at 11:20 a.m. May 19, an increase of 10 since 8:30 a.m. May 18, according to the Unified Government Health Department’s COVID-19 webpage. (From UG COVID-19 webpage)
Doctors at the University of Kansas Health System were cautiously optimistic on Tuesday morning.
COVID-19 positive inpatients at the KU Health System on Tuesday morning totaled 16 patients, up one since Monday, and seven in the intensive care unit, down one since Monday, according to Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control at the KU Health System. The hospital continues to have discharges and new admissions, he said at a news conference.
Dr. David Wild, vice president of performance improvement at KU Health System, said that at the hospital and county levels, they are beginning to see decreases in new cases. As time goes on, there will be more data to assess the situation and make predictions for the future based on what actually is happening rather than on models of what might happen, he said.
Dr. Ed Ellerbeck, chair of population health at KU Health System, said they have successfully bent the curve with the social distancing program. He mentioned his personal experience at seeing crowds out in public however; when he runs at the park, it’s now crowded and he tries to keep 15 feet away from others.
“Our infection rate is down quite a bit. But if you go back into history, we put the stay-at-home orders in Kansas on March 28,” he said. At that time, the state as a whole had 59 cases, and right now, the state is averaging around 150 cases a day, he said. There’s a lower rate in the metropolitan area now, having done a good job in lowering the rate.
“We’re back to where we were at the start of this, and as we loosen things up, we really could get a season’s spike of a couple months down the road,” Dr. Ellerbeck said.
Dr. Wild agreed that the lower numbers being seen currently are the result of what was done three or four weeks ago. They’re seeing the benefit of social distancing. As society reopens, there is a concern of some rise in the number of new cases, he said.
On the topic of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 cases, Dr. Hawkinson said some trials showed an improvement with it, but the best trials showed there was no improvement and some possible side effects such as arrhythmia or heart attacks in certain patients. There are trials ongoing on the preventive use of the medication among health care workers, and they are waiting for answers on these studies, he said.
Dr. Ellerbeck said some smaller rural communities are susceptible to COVID-19 outbreaks because it only takes one person who is infected to spread it and cause outbreaks.
Hotspots in rural Kansas are a problem, with one or two workers infected, then spreading it, he said. If a worker who tests positive in an industrial situation such as a meatpacking plant is at home with people who work in a nursing home, there could be concern about secondary spread, he added.
Dr. Wild said some counties are seeing only 2 to 3 percent rates of hospitalizations, which indicates a different population is being infected.
“We know in Wyandotte County when there were larger clusters in nursing homes, patients with co-existing disease and of an older age, there was a higher hospitalization rate,” Dr. Wild said. “Now that the majority of the new infections in Wyandotte County are in younger or not in clusters of nursing homes, there’s a slightly different hospitalization rate. Maybe different people getting infected than early on, or at least the clusters are in different places and a different demographic of the patient population.”
Also, they thought hospitalizations started seven to 10 days after infection, and now they know more about the asymptomatic days of infection, maybe it’s longer, possibly 12 to 14 days, he said. They might see an uptick, he added.
“Each county is behaving differently,” Dr. Wild said.
Dr. Ellerbeck said a 20 percent positivity rate seen locally and in the state suggests that they are still just testing the infected individuals. He was a little concerned they are still treating testing as a scarce resource. As they open up the community, they need to get a little more aggressive about testing individuals, he said. They need to be able to identify asymptomatic spreaders and get them isolated, he added.
The CDC is still focusing testing on symptomatic individuals, and testing will have to move beyond that, and where there are outbreaks, the asymptomatic contacts need to be tested quickly, he said.
The more they test, the more likely they are to find asymptomatic individuals, Dr. Wild said.
It’s important to look at Wyandotte and Johnson counties and understand what the decreasing positivity rate means in those counties, he said. Hospitals are testing patients admitted to the hospital, screening them for COVID-19 before surgeries or chemotherapy, he said. They have tested more asymptomatic people that they don’t expect to see a positive result, he added. That has changed the positivity rate in both counties, and probably showed a decreased incidence of disease, he said.
Also, he said they’re testing a little differently, so it’s difficult to compare the positivity rate now to the rate two months ago.
Even in the highest testing rate counties, they’ve maybe tested 2 to 2.5 percent of the population, Dr. Wild said.
Dr. Hawkinson said a recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at Los Angeles County, did random sampling and determined a 4 percent positivity rate to reach a possible figure of 365,000. It matters who is tested, and they should test as many people as possible to determine the dynamics of who is infected, according to Dr. Hawkinson.
Dr. Ellerbeck said probably closer to 98 percent of the people are still susceptible in this area. He said it only takes one case to get an outbreak going, so he wouldn’t be totally assured by low rates.
Some of the restrictions on people in the metropolitan area have loosened these past few days, although Wyandotte County remains in the “red zone” of its reopening plan.
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer for the KU Health System, said he thinks COVID-19 is still out there significantly, and that two weeks from now, on June 1, they could get a better picture of it.
While some people may be going out as if things are back to normal, things aren’t back to normal, Dr. Stites said.
Dr. Wild said Kansas had the 23rd highest rate of COVID-19 infection in the United States, according to data per capita.
Density affects the ability to transmit COVID-19 and can be related to the length and duration of the exposure, according to Dr. Stites. Working and living conditions can be related to the amount of exposure.
Dr. Hawkinson said if people can maintain a further distance from each other, and a shorter time, it affects exposure.
A choir study of COVID-19 spread showed chairs were 20 to 30 inches apart and people were there for a couple of hours, Dr. Wild said. Greater closeness and longer time contributed to the spread of the disease.
Living conditions here that may affect the spread of COVID-19 include homes where not everybody has his own bedroom, according to Dr. Ellerbeck. There are multifamily living units, with a higher density of people living together. Also, some people have to take mass transit together. At meatpacking or processing plants, people are in closer contact with each other, he said.
Individuals living or working in those situations or using that kind of transportation are less likely to be wealthy and to be from under-represented minority communities, he said.
“They are bearing the brunt of this crisis,” Dr. Ellerbeck said.
Dr. Wild said a study of the Navajo nation found that one of the key features related to transmission was multigenerational family units. The nation had very low population density and a high rate of positive cases. They had 50 percent more per capita rate than compared with New York, according to Dr. Hawkinson.
The groups with the biggest health disparities also are the workers most important to society, including the first-line workers and supply-chain drivers, Dr. Hawkinson said.
Dr. Ellerbeck said keeping the workplace safe will mean social distancing and wearing masks to protect the people around you. He worried that some people will try to act “tough” and not wear a mask, but a mask protects others, he said.
Dr. Hawkinson recommended wearing a mask in public, including if getting a haircut or other personal services. He recommended not going if you are ill or if the provider is ill. Those who receive personal services should use hand sanitizer when coming in and going out of a hair salon or other business, he said. The 20 to 25 minutes spent there and the close proximity to another person means a very high risk, he added.
Dr. Ellerbeck recommended that parents get their children in for routine checkups and for scheduled immunizations.
Dr. Hawkinson said it would be tragic if kids didn’t get their regularly scheduled vaccines for mumps, measles and other diseases and were to get those diseases, and possibly COVID-19 as well.
Dr. Stites asked people to continue their good hygiene practices until a COVID-19 vaccine is available, which he thinks is not that far away, perhaps five months.
Wyandotte County reported 1,173 positive COVID-19 cases at 11:20 a.m. May 19, an increase of 10 since 8:30 a.m. May 18, according to the Unified Government Health Department’s COVID-19 webpage. There were no new deaths reported at 11:20 a.m., with the same total number, 70, as on May 18.
Hospitalizations were reported at the same number, 30, as on May 18, with recoveries at 365, an increase of 10, according to the UG COVID-19 webpage.
Testing continues Tuesday in Wyandotte County
According to the UG’s COVID-19 hub, testing locations for COVID-19 include:
• 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at the UG Health Department parking lot, 619 Ann Ave., Kansas City, Kansas.
• 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday at Swope Health, 21 N. 12th St., Suite 400, Kansas City, Kansas. Call 816-923-5800 to schedule an appointment.
Several pop-up testing sites are planned this week. Wyandotte County residents may call 913-371-9298 to register for a test.
Tuesday’s pop-up location: • 2 to 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 19, Turner Recreation Commission, 831 S. 55th St., Kansas City, Kansas.
Wednesday’s pop-up location: • 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday, May 20, at KC Community Church, 5901 Leavenworth Road, Kansas City, Kansas.
