Category: Health

COVID-19 cases increasing in colleges

Wyandotte County had 44 new positive COVID-19 cases on Friday, with a cumulative total of 5,822, according to the UG COVID-19 website. There were no additional deaths on Friday, with a cumulative total of 113. (From UG COVID-19 webpage)

Hundreds of COVID-19 cases are cropping up in colleges and universities in Kansas, according to Dr. Lee Norman, Kansas secretary of health.

Dr. Norman made his remarks at the Aug. 28 University of Kansas Health System news conference.

At this time, kindergarten through 12th grade schools tend to be doing better than colleges, he added.

Some universities, such as KU, are doing widespread testing. At KU, 10 fraternities and sororities recently were quarantined because of COVID-19 cases, according to the doctors.

The KDHE website stated there were 16 outbreaks in colleges and universities, with 189 cases and one hospitalization.

Dr. Norman said they would start displaying data for schools and universities soon on the KDHE COVID-19 website.

He said the school and colleges would be listed by name so people have access. They will associate the fraternity and sorority houses with the university, he added.

Dr. Steve Stites said congregations, parties, fraternities, games, political rallies – it doesn’t really matter what the event is, if people don’t wear masks and socially distance.

Spreadsheets show school COVID-19 numbers

Alisha Morris, an Olathe theater teacher, has created spreadsheets that tell how much COVID-19 is in schools throughout the nation.

Her spreadsheets have become very popular, especially among teachers who are looking for more information about COVID-19 in schools. At the KU Health Systems news conference, she said she enters information from published news reports on the spreadsheets, and she has other volunteers who help.

Because there are so many hours required to collect and enter this data, Morris said she will soon be turning over the spreadsheets to the National Education Association to work on it, while she goes to teacher training to get ready for school starting.

Morris said some school district leaders have told her they used the information from the spreadsheets in order to help make decisions.

Also, the amount of COVID-19 in a school building is the kind of information a lot of parents would want to know when making the decision about whether to send their children back to school, according to Morris.

Morris’ spreadsheet for Kansas schools shows five school districts, none in Wyandotte County. The list includes the Blue Valley School District in Johnson County.

She said although school has not yet started in many areas of Kansas, some of the COVID-19 cases are from athletic practices that have started.

Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer at KU Health System, said the decision many parents are making on whether to go back to school in person is a private and personal one based on health and family, among other factors. One of the other factors is knowing the risk in the school and community, and the data provided by the spreadsheet may help parents with that.

The University of Kansas Health System reported 27 positive acute COVID-19 cases on Friday morning, down two from Thursday morning, according to Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection control and prevention. There were four patients in the intensive care unit, down from 10 on Thursday, and three on ventilators, down from five on Thursday.

There were another 27 patients hospitalized at KU Health System with COVID-19 who are not in the acute infection phase any longer, with three of those on ventilators, according to Dr. Hawkinson.

Wyandotte County had 44 new positive COVID-19 cases on Friday, with a cumulative total of 5,822, according to the UG COVID-19 website. There were no additional deaths on Friday, with a cumulative total of 113.

The state of Kansas reported 41,048 COVID-19 cases with 443 deaths on Friday morning, according to the KDHE. It was an increase of 1,111 cases since Wednesday, and six more deaths since Wednesday, according to KDHE.

The KC Region COVID-19 Resource Hub reported a total cumulative 31,984 cases on Friday in a nine-county area. Kansas City, Missouri, reported 8,466 cases, according to the website.

There were 501 outbreaks in the state reported on Friday, an increase of 26 outbreaks since Wednesday, according to the KDHE.

Johnson County reported 7,920 cases on Friday, an increase of 238 cases since Wednesday, according to the KDHE.

Leavenworth County reported 1,674 cases on Friday, an increase of 16 cases since Wednesday, KDHE stated.

Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita, reported 7,093 cases, an increase of 101 cases since Wednesday, according to KDHE.

Douglas County, which includes Lawrence, reported 1,189 cases, an increase of 114 cases since Wednesday, according to KDHE. All the university students are being tested in Douglas County, and they are counted in that county’s total.

Riley County, where Manhattan is located, reported 656 cases on Friday, an increase of 82 cases since Wednesday, according to KDHE.

Shawnee County, which includes Topeka, reported 2,123 cases, an increase of 56 cases since Wednesday, according to KDHE.

Quarantines could be ahead for those who attend away football games

Quarantines for attending a University of Kansas or Kansas State University away football game?

That might be possible now that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment has issued new travel guidelines.

One of the new KDHE travel guidelines says that anyone who attends an out-of-state gathering of more than 500 people after Aug. 11 should quarantine for 14 days.

Dr. Lee Norman, Kansas secretary of health, said on Friday morning that cases are cropping up from gatherings without social distancing and mask-wearing.

“If they can’t be social distanced, then they should be quarantined upon coming back,” Dr. Norman said. ”We just know they’re going to spread more virus.”

The rule applies where anti-contagion measures including distancing and masking are not being mitigated, he added.

The local Wyandotte County health order prohibits gatherings of more than 45 and also mandates masks and social distancing.

When Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Task Force on Coronavirus visited here recently, she advised people not to have gatherings of more than 10 people.

The state’s travel quarantine list also includes several countries, including Aruba, the UK and Ireland, as well as travel on cruise ships.

Dr. Hawkinson said that people should use both masking and social distancing at the same time for the best results. The doctors also advised people to wash their hands and stay home when ill.

The KU doctors’ news conference is at https://www.facebook.com/kuhospital/videos/3919002578115283.

The KDHE travel quarantine list is at https://www.coronavirus.kdheks.gov/175/Travel-Exposure-Related-Isolation-Quaran.

To view the spreadsheet on COVID-19 in schools, visit https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=00a2d3fbe4184e75b06f392fc66dca13.

For more information on who may be tested and what to bring, visit https://wyandotte-county-covid-19-hub-unifiedgov.hub.arcgis.com/pages/what-to-do-if-you-think-you-have-covid-19.

The Unified Government Health Department is now collecting input on people’s experiences getting tested for COVID-19 in Wyandotte County. The survey is on the UG website at https://us.openforms.com/Form/ea97a450-3d74-4d86-8d1f-6e340d55cf7c.


The UG Health Department sports order is online at https://alpha.wycokck.org/files/assets/public/health/documents/covid/08132020localhealthofficerorderregardingsports.pdf.


The Wyandotte County school start order is online at https://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information.


Wyandotte County is under a mandatory mask order and is in Phase 3 of the state’s reopening plan. For more information, residents may visit the UG COVID-19 website at https://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information or call 311 for more information.


The CDC’s COVID-19 web page is at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html.

Saliva is making it possible to quickly test tens of thousands of Kansans for coronavirus

State officials hope two labs in Johnson County could help Kansas boost its testing capacity dramatically for schools, nursing homes and asymptomatic people.

by Celia Llopis-Jepsen, Kansas News Service

Lenexa, Kansas — One lab has helped seven Kansas universities test tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff for COVID-19 for the fall semester. And all anyone needed to do was spit.

Saliva lab work has the potential to dramatically increase testing of asymptomatic Kansans with no known COVID-19 exposure, state health officials say. That’s a critical ingredient for stopping the pandemic.

Last week, Kansas health secretary Lee Norman suggested the state partner with labs such as Lenexa-based Clinical Reference Laboratory and a second Lenexa company that does saliva and other COVID-19 testing for major hospitals, MAWD Pathology Group.

“Anybody can spit into a tube. That would be a game changer,” Norman told a state task force. “That would really open up the floodgates.”

He suggested tapping the labs to help the state’s nursing homes and schools, and to regularly test large numbers of Kansans without symptoms, not just patients who turn up at doctor’s offices feeling sick.

Collecting saliva holds a few advantages over swabs that dip deep into one’s nasal passages. Most people can spit into a tube without help from a nurse or other medical professional decked out in protective gear.

Already, Kansas has surpassed its target of testing more than 60,000 people per month three months in a row, but Norman said “it’s not enough.” The state has focused largely on people with symptoms or exposure to known COVID-19 outbreaks — a triage level of testing that epidemiologists widely agree falls short of what’s needed.

To dramatically slow viral transmission, the Harvard Global Health Institute said last month that Kansas must more than triple the number of people tested daily to nearly 13,000, while keeping up social distancing and mask-wearing. Only five states are testing enough people to suppress the virus.

The state may already have the capacity to top that, MAWD president Samuel Caughron said. His lab can handle 10,000 to 15,000 tests daily, but doesn’t use its full capacity.

“We’ve been seeing, as other labs have, our volumes declining,” he said. “There is something of a disconnect between what could be, and what’s happening.”

The challenge for Kansas, he said, is creating a process that links organizations in need of mass testing to labs that can return results within a day or two.

Stocking up

Harvard experts have warned saliva testing could face supply shortages, too, just like tests that use nasal or throat swabs.

While waiting months for the U.S. Food And Drug Administration to authorize its tests, Lenexa’s Clinical Reference Laboratory used the time to install hard-to-get liquid-handling robots and squirrel away as many supplies as it could. Authorization came through July 30.

“Honestly, we’ve just been building inventory since the day this started,” CEO Bob Thompson said. “So we’re feeling really good about our supply chain.”

The company currently provides test results within 1-2 days.

Saliva tests (and saliva-sputum tests that require the person to cough before spitting) detect genetic material — RNA — from the coronavirus. That’s the same science used with deep nasal swabs, but collecting saliva is quicker in large populations like prisons, schools and colleges. It saves precious masks and gloves, and it’s a less unpleasant option for people who have to take the test repeatedly, such as nursing home residents, athletes and health care workers.

At the University of Kansas, saliva tests have detected more than 200 cases of COVID-19 so far, and revealed higher rates of the virus among fraternities and sororities. This week Douglas County health officials ordered residents of nine fraternity and sorority houses into two-week quarantine.

CRL in Lenexa has already processed 30,000 tests for seven Kansas schools, including KU, Emporia State University, Wichita State University, Fort Hays State University and Benedictine College — as well as 4,000 tests for four in Missouri.

The lab said it could handle several more thousand tests per day for Kansas. The company currently processes about 10,000 a day, with a focus on the Kansas and Missouri markets, and expects to reach 20,000 a day by mid-September.

It’s in talks with Kansas school districts, too, and recently inked a deal with Los Angeles Unified School District to join a bevy of labs assisting its 600,000-student school system. Minnesota is providing saliva tests (which aren’t from CRL) to all its schools, and announced this week it will spend nearly $15 million on a new lab for saliva samples.

The state lab in Topeka also plans to start processing saliva samples in-house, a Kansas Department of Health and Environment spokeswoman said Friday. It has the right equipment, but must first complete legwork to ensure its results would be valid.

For mass testing of largely asymptomatic people at places like colleges, CRL pools material from five people at a time to speed up the process. When a combined sample contains the virus, CRL then retrieves the five vials to retest each person’s saliva individually and pinpoint the source.

While CRL received FDA authorization, not all COVID-19 tests — saliva or otherwise — have that.

The backlogged agency allowed many tests onto market while awaiting review, and last week the Trump administration axed the requirement for federally regulated labs with advanced capabilities to undergo FDA scrutiny.

MAWD’s test, a variation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention method, does not have FDA authorization yet but the company may still pursue it.

Pittsburg State University uses Cytocheck, a lab in Parsons, but didn’t answer questions about whether the FDA has greenlighted its tests. Cytocheck wouldn’t speak to the Kansas News Service about its product.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen reports on consumer health and education for the Kansas News Service. You can follow her on Twitter @celia_LJ or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org. The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
Kansas News Service stories and photos may be republished by news media at no cost with proper attribution and a link to ksnewsservice.org.
See more at https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-08-28/saliva-is-making-it-possible-to-quickly-test-tens-of-thousands-of-kansans-for-coronavirus.

Kansas COVID-19 numbers heading in wrong direction

COVID-19 case numbers went up more than 1,500 in Kansas over the weekend. (Chart from KDHE)
Wyandotte County reported 5,619 total cumulative COVID-19 cases on Monday, an increase of 22 since Sunday, according to the Unified Government’s COVID-19 webpage. There were no additional deaths reported; the cumulative total was 111. (From UG COVID-19 webpage)
In the state’s cluster report, colleges or universities were reported to have six clusters and 82 cases, according to KDHE information. (KDHE chart)

Kansas COVID-19 numbers are moving in the wrong direction, according to Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly.

Kansas had 1,545 positive cases and seven more deaths since Friday, according to Gov. Kelly. That brought the state to a cumulative total of 38,401 cases and 426 deaths on Monday. In Wyandotte County, however, the rates have been declining recently.

Now, all of Kansas’ 105 counties have at least one COVID-19 case, according to the governor.

“In these moments it can become easy to become desensitized by the numbers as they continue to grow,” Gov. Kelly said at the 4 p.m. news conference Monday.

The positive infection rate continues an alarming trend in the wrong direction for Kansas, she said.

“To make matters worse, as college students return to campus, we’ve experienced a rise in clusters stemming from mass gatherings at six of our campuses and at one fraternity,” she said.

An initial round of testing has found that 87 University of Kansas students and two faculty members have tested positive for COVID-19, she said.

In Manhattan, Kansas, 13 members of a single fraternity at K-State have tested positive, she said.

KDHE informed her on Monday that one Kansas college student has been hospitalized with what is suspected to be multi-system inflammatory syndrome, associated with COVID-19. She offered her best wishes for recovery for the student and all who are battling COVID-19.

“Please let this serve as a reminder, let’s take the threat of COVID-19 seriously,” she said.

As schools start to open, people must be more diligent, she said. Children can catch and spread the virus, and while they may be asymptomatic, their families and teachers may not be, she added.

Masks, social distancing and sanitation are necessary to stop the spread of the virus, not only in the schools but in communities, she added. She encouraged parents and adults to lead by example and wear masks.

“We must continue to be diligent, to wear masks and to social distance. Our health, our economy and our schools depend upon it,” she said.

Wyandotte County reported 5,619 total cumulative COVID-19 cases on Monday, an increase of 22 since Sunday, according to the Unified Government’s COVID-19 webpage. There were no additional deaths reported; the cumulative total was 111.

At the University of Kansas Health System, Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control, reported 25 COVID-19 acute patients on Monday morning, an increase of five since Sunday. There were 10 patients in the intensive care unit and six on ventilators, he said. There are still 30 patients in the hospital who have had COVID-19 and are past the 10 days and are not considered contagious. Two of those still need ventilators.

Doctors invent tent to keep patients safer

Doctors in the KU Health System have invented a way to keep patients and staff safer, especially in the operating room.

Anesthesiologists invented the “contagion tent,” a small, clear plastic tent that will unfold quickly and lock together quickly, being placed over the patient’s head while the patient is on the operating table, according to a news conference on Monday at KU Health System.

Dr. Jay Nachtigal, Dr. Jared Staab and Dr. Brigid Flynn were among the anesthesiologists working on the project. Dr. Nachtigal said the device was designed to be portable, disposable and affordable. The device could follow a patient during the patient’s entire stay at a hospital, according to the inventors. Also, it’s possible it might be used in ambulances. Health care providers may not need as much personal protective equipment with it, according to the inventors.

The device has negative air pressure as well as airtight openings to allow doctors to put gloved hands inside to manipulate equipment.

Biomedical Devices of Kansas in Tonganoxie built the prototype. Doctors started making the device in a garage. They also worked on it in a lab.

Doctors hope that the device will receive Food and Drug Administration approval, perhaps emergency use authorization at first.

Free testing offered

Free COVID-19 testing is planned from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 25, at All Saints parish, 811 Vermont, Kansas City, Kansas, through Vibrant Health and the Health Equity Task Force.

Free testing also is offered from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday at the Unified Government Health Department parking lot at 6th and Ann, Kansas City, Kansas. For more information, call 311.

For more information on who may be tested and what to bring, visit https://wyandotte-county-covid-19-hub-unifiedgov.hub.arcgis.com/pages/what-to-do-if-you-think-you-have-covid-19.

Gov. Laura Kelly’s news conference is at https://www.facebook.com/GovLauraKelly/videos/326252398816890.

The KU doctors’ news conference is at https://www.facebook.com/kuhospital/videos/617652862274323

The Unified Government Health Department is now collecting input on people’s experiences getting tested for COVID-19 in Wyandotte County. The survey is on the UG website at https://us.openforms.com/Form/ea97a450-3d74-4d86-8d1f-6e340d55cf7c.

The UG Health Department sports order is online at https://alpha.wycokck.org/files/assets/public/health/documents/covid/08132020localhealthofficerorderregardingsports.pdf.

The Wyandotte County school start order is online at https://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information.

Wyandotte County is under a mandatory mask order and is in Phase 3 of the state’s reopening plan. For more information, residents may visit the UG COVID-19 website at https://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information or call 311 for more information.

The CDC’s COVID-19 web page is at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html.