Wyandotte County reported 336 total positive COVID-19 cases on Monday, an increase of five cases from Sunday, and one more death.
According to the Unified Government’s COVID-19 webpage at 10 a.m. Monday, there were a total of 25 deaths from COVID-19 in Wyandotte County since the pandemic started.
On Sunday, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported 1,337 positive cases in Kansas, with 56 deaths. Johnson County reported 300 positive cases with 14 deaths on Sunday. Leavenworth County reported 90 confirmed tests and 1 death on Sunday.
Doctors stress good hygiene, social distancing
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infectious prevention and control at the KU Health System, said the KU Health System had about the same number as COVID-19 patients, 31, in the hospital on Monday, about the same as last week. Almost half were in the intensive care unit, however, he added. A major university hospital in St. Louis currently has about four times more COVID-19 patients on ventilators than what KU Health System has, he added, as not enough social distancing was being practiced there.
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said he believes early efforts by the Core 4 local governments in the Kansas City area have worked to keep COVID-19 numbers down. It’s relatively flat here compared to St. Louis, he said.
Dr. Hawkinson said he saw a lot of young people congregating together at the parks over the weekend. It’s imperative that parents and guardians tell the youth not to play together and to keep social distance from each other, he said, as it only takes one to two to bring the virus home to their moms, dads and grandparents.
At some point in the future, as the country prepares to reopen, there will still probably be various levels of the coronavirus, and people still will need to be careful, according to Dr. Stites.
On Monday morning Dr. Stites also talked about the necessity to keep staying home, practicing hygiene, washing hands, social distancing, not touching one’s face, coughing into a sleeve, cleaning off surfaces, and other health practices.
KU medical school to participate in study for health care workers
The University of Kansas Medical School will be participating in a Heroes Study for health care workers.
According to Dr. Mario Castro, vice chair for clinical and translational research and pulmonologist at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, 15,000 health care workers will be able to sign up for the study voluntarily through 60 different sites. As part of the study, half of the health care workers will receive 30 days of hydroxychloroquine, while the other half will receive a placebo, he said.
The University of Kansas School of Medicine hopes to recruit 500 volunteers from the region. The health care workers might include those whose work takes them into contact with COVID-19 patients, including nurses, medical technicians and workers who clean patients’ rooms, according to the KU doctors.
In some areas where there were high numbers of COVID-19 patients, rates of infection of health care workers have been one-fourth or one-fifth, according to the KU doctors.
“We need to know if this medication is safe for health care workers, and we need to also know is it effective, can it prevent health care infections in our workers,” he said.
A website at heroesresearch.org provides more information on the study.
To see the KU Health System news conference, visit https://www.facebook.com/kuhospital/.
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.
The CDC COVID-19 page is at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html.