Month: February 2022

by Noah Taborda, Kansas Reflector

Topeka — While COVID-19 case numbers are beginning to decline in Kansas hospitals, officials are issuing a warning to stay vigilant and follow the pillars of infection prevention.

Hospital administrators reported on a University of Kansas Health System briefing Wednesday that they are seeing improvements across the board with additional bandwidth for non-COVID patients. Still, they are reminding people to remain on guard as the ebbs and flows of the pandemic remain uncertain.

Richard Watson, the co-founder of Motient, which assists the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in connecting rural hospitals when transferring patients, said beds are beginning to clear up. Transfers remain well behind pre-pandemic speeds, however.

“Patients are waiting 10-plus hours for transport, as opposed to what we usually see if it were normal capacity, where it would be one to two hours with time-critical diseases being less than an hour to move patients,” Watson said. “This is an unbelievably exceptional moment we have, and while there is a good trend all across the board, we don’t think that this is letting up next week or the week after.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, KDHE has recorded 748,520 COVID-19 cases, 7,725 deaths and 18,562 hospitalizations. Currently, 33% of intensive care unit beds are available statewide, an improvement from 21% just a month ago.

A major factor is the number of long-haul COVID-19 patients, said Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the health system.

“That’s a whole group of folks we’re not talking a lot about yet, but we’re going to be talking about for years to come because there are a lot of people who are going to suffer or are suffering for a very long time,” Stites said.

For those fully vaccinated and boosted, administrators said letting your guard down when around others who are taking similar precautionary measures may be all right in specific situations. Still, unpredictable mutations and warning signs from countries like the United Kingdom have administrators concerned spring could bring another surge.

James Alexander, chief medical officer for St. Catherine Hospital in Garden City, said in times where hospitals are struggling, it is paramount the public pick up the slack to ensure they are not overwhelmed.

“I have a concern about this little glitch where omicron wasn’t ‘as bad’ as delta, but who knows what’s next,” Alexander said. “Maybe we’ll have another delta. That’s my concern, and so we just have to educate communities.”

Issues extend beyond high case numbers and limited beds. For example, Lisa Hays, chief medical officer of AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, said they have had difficulties with the supply chain, particularly Styrofoam cups for patients.

“Our emergency management manager had to do a Costco run and buy up as many Styrofoam cups as he could,” Hays said.

Robert Freelove, chief medical officer of Salina Regional Health Center, said they have encountered struggles in the PCR testing supply chain.

“We’ve had to send more tests out to reference labs, and there’s a lag there of three to five days to get some of those results back,” Freelove said. “So, while it does look like our case rate has dropped some, it’s hard to tell for sure because of that lag.”

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See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/02/09/kansas-medical-officers-warn-declining-covid-19-caseload-doesnt-mean-people-are-in-the-clear/

The Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools are moving to self-administered COVID testing for employees for the time being, according to Dr. Anna Stubblefield, superintendent.

Dr. Stubblefield said at the Tuesday night school board meeting that the company it had hired has notified the district it would no longer provide testing, as of the end of this week.

The school district has an employee testing policy for those employees and volunteers who are not vaccinated.

Dr. Stubblefield said they are working to get more saliva COVID tests but they are not readily available, and there is a shortage of tests.

She said the district’s health service team will create protocols around self-administered tests for employees who have not shown proof of vaccination and are required to test.

Although it would be a change in practice, it isn’t a change in policy, according to district officials.

Dr. Stubblefield also told the school board there were individuals who have refused to test, with the district now going through an employee process, and their cases may be brought to the board in the future. Some employees, for medical to religious reasons, are choosing not to do the tests, she added.

Board President Randy Lopez said the original idea of the district’s testing policy was to encourage employees to get vaccinated.

Board member Rachel Russell made a motion to remove the testing policy until further notice, but she later withdrew the motion after more discussion with Tiffany Lewis, director of health services for the school district. The board also discussed having only symptomatic persons tested for COVID, but that idea also did not move forward. Russell said there was no point in being tested if the employees were answering “yes” to any of the three COVID screening questions they are asked.

Board member Wanda Brownlee Paige said that there is a problem with that, as some employees in the past still showed up at school despite having symptoms.

She said she would like to table the motion, so the health services team could come up with a proposal. The board should not hurry to do anything but should think it through, she said.

Russell said making the decision to no longer contact trace COVID cases hurt them more than losing the tests, as there is no way of knowing where the cases are coming from.

Lewis said the school district did not stop contact tracing, it just moved to a more generic form of contact tracing. Instead of calling each individual who was a contact of a positive case, the district now sends a generic letter to each building, she said. With the surge in COVID cases, the contact tracing team fell behind, and couldn’t make individual calls, she said. They still work with building administrators, notifying buildings and children, she added.

Dr. Stubblefield said most employees notify the district if they are sick. The district is still allowing time off.

The district will expect employees who have symptoms to stay home, and take a home test, she said. The district has sent out notifications and updates based on quarantine rules.

Lopez encouraged the health team to come back with a recommendation or options at a future meeting.

In response to a question from board member Valdenia Winn, Dr. Stubblefield said if employees do not get vaccinated and refuse to get tested, the policy is to follow a progressive discipline model , eventually going to the board, recommending termination. They are almost there with a couple of people now, according to the superintendent.

Lewis said there have been some occurrences where unvaccinated employees did not want to test, but in most cases they did take a test the second time.

Dr. Winn said she believed COVID is not going away, which is why she was a little reluctant to support doing away with the testing policy.

Russell said she believed a 70 to 80 percent vaccination rate is pretty good for a district that has 4,400 employees.

Lopez said the intent of the policy was to encourage staff to get vaccinated, not to suspend or terminate staff.

Earlier in the meeting, the school board heard two community comments. One was from an advocate of doing away with masks in the schools, who denied that masks were effective. The other commenter was a district teacher who pleaded with the board to keep the mask rule in place, as they were trying to prevent COVID from spreading through the schools.