There was an increase of 32 cases today in the positive COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County, according to the Unified Government COVID-19 webpage.
Wyandotte County, which has stepped up COVID-19 testing this week, is reporting 458 positive COVID-19 cases at 10:55 a.m. Wednesday, April 22. Wyandotte County reported 426 positive cases at 8:25 a.m. Tuesday, April 21.
The number of deaths increased from 44 reported early Tuesday to 45 reported Wednesday in Wyandotte County, according to the UG’s COVID-19 webpage.
Some area hospitals are seeing a decline in the number of COVID-19 patients who are hospitalized, according to doctors participating in a University of Kansas Health System news conference on Wednesday morning.
The KU Health System on Wednesday morning had 24 COVID-19 patients, including 11 in the intensive care unit, according to Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control at KU Health System. The total number is down from 26 on Tuesday. There were eight patients in ICU on Tuesday. They were awaiting results on another 20-21 patients, he said.
Doctors are dealing with changing information.
In the past, doctors have told people who were sick in January that it was not COVID-19, since the coronavirus was not reported yet in America, Dr. Hawkinson said. Recently, some new information is coming from California that stated COVID-19 might have been there in February, before it was in the state of Washington.
“The way it spreads is very insidious,” Dr. Hawkinson said. “There are still a lot of questions to be answered.”
Originally, doctors thought each person with the virus could infect two people, but now they think it is closer to five, he said.
“This is why we are really stressing the physical distancing for all this, to really stop the spread,” he said.
Some other hospitals in the Kansas City area have been experiencing declines in the numbers of COVID-19 patients hospitalized.
Truman Medical Center reported four persons with COVID-19 currently in the hospital, with two in the ICU, according to Dr. Mark Steele, executive chief clinical officer. The peak was 12 last Tuesday, he said. There are 11 patients pending testing in the hospital currently.
About 32 COVID-19 patients have been discharged to date at Truman, and they celebrate those discharges, he said. Truman has expanded its testing recently in mobile sites for Kansas City, Missouri, and Jackson County residents. He said four to five times as many African-American residents test positive for COVID-19 as white residents. He added that is one of the reasons they decided to take testing into the community.
Dr. Raghu Adiga, chief medical officer of Liberty Hospital, said the hospital currently has two COVID-19 inpatients. There are four that are awaiting test results, he said. The numbers have been flat over the past week or two, he added. The hospital started drive-through testing over a month ago, he said.
There have been more than 2,000 telehealth visits, he said. Five health care workers out of 1,000 workers have tested positive, and they were pretty much community onset, he said.
Dr. Adiga said it was important to keep social distancing in place because some studies have shown there were two patients with no symptoms or mild symptoms in the general population for every patient who sought health care.
Dr. Larry Botts, chief medical officer at AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, said the hospital currently has 11 positive COVID-19 patients, with no patients awaiting test results. They are now doing in-house testing, he said. Out of the 11 patients, there are two on ventilators, he said.
There has been a steady decrease in COVID-19 patient numbers since 26 patients on April 6, he said. There have been more than 100 discharges, and they celebrate those, he said.
AdventHealth is participating in a Mayo Clinic trial using convalescent plasma from donations to the Community Blood Center, he said. Three patients have been treated so far with plasma from recovered coronavirus patients. Dr. Botts said results from the national study will be important in the future.
To see the KU Health System news conference, visit https://www.facebook.com/kuhospital/videos/532109057731828/.
The UG’s COVID-19 webpage is at https://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information.
The Kansas COVID-19 resource page is at https://govstatus.egov.com/coronavirus.