Sixty-nine Kansas counties reported positive COVID-19 cases on Monday. Eight more deaths were reported in the state, for a total of 100 deaths statewide. (KDHE map)
One of the new deaths over the weekend from COVID-19 was related to a church cluster of cases in Wyandotte County, according to state health officials.
A local pastor died over the weekend after a fight with COVID-19 that started in late March.
There now are 100 Kansans who have died, an increase of eight since Sunday, Gov. Laura Kelly said today. There was an increase of 137 positive COVID-19 cases since Sunday, to 1,986. Sixty-nine counties have reported positive cases.
The number of positive COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County rose to 426, according to the 2:35 p.m. Unified Government Health Department report. Wyandotte County deaths rose to 44, according to the afternoon report. It was an increase of seven from 37 deaths reported on Sunday.
“I recognize that we are talking about Kansans,” Gov. Kelly said at the news conference Monday. “Someone’s mom, someone’s husband, someone’s friend, I don’t ever forget these are real people, not just numbers.”
Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said today there were five clusters of cases that were related to religious gatherings in Kansas.
The Wyandotte County death over the weekend was part of a cluster with 51 cases and seven deaths from one religious meeting, he said. That meeting was held before the local stay-at-home order went into effect.
In all, the state is monitoring 39 clusters of cases, Dr. Norman said.
From the 39 clusters, the state has had 634 positive cases, 111 hospitalizations and 56 deaths, he said.
The clusters included 14 long-term care facilities, two group living arrangements, Lansing Correctional Facility, two health care facilities, five religious gatherings and 15 private companies, Dr. Norman said.
On Saturday night, a federal judge ruled that two churches that sued the state, one in Junction City and another in Dodge City, could temporarily meet despite the governor’s order limiting church services to 10 and fewer people. A temporary restraining order on the governor’s executive order, for those two churches only, was put in place until the judge can hear a motion later this week. The ruling did not apply to any other churches in the state.
Dr. Norman said he was not enthusiastic about the judge’s ruling.
“The question is, the judge not only acted in a judicial manner, but made public health recommendations,” Dr. Norman said. “In reality, if we were living in a more liberalized world as we start to turn the lights back on, and go back toward social distancing, they would be recommendations that down the road, in a continuum of time, would be sensible recommendations to make. But they are not sensible recommendations right now.”
On the question of public protests, Dr. Norman said the only good thing is they’re outdoors and it’s breezy. However, he believes people often are too close together in protests.
A group may be planning to demonstrate this week in Topeka. Another group was protesting Monday in Kansas City, Missouri. Gov. Kelly said she is a big believer in free speech, and as long as they are in groups of 10 or fewer, six feet apart, they have every right. However, she said it would not distract her from what she needs to do, which is to protect the health and safety of all Kansans and prepare a detailed plan to reopen when it is time.
Gov. Kelly said she understands many residents feel impatient for life to return to normal, and everyone wants to return to normal as soon as they can. Testing and contact tracing will be part of the steps necessary to reopen. Her administration will reach out to health and business leaders this week as they work on the transition, she said.
“The saga of coronavirus has been compared to a war,” Gov. Kelly said, “it’s been compared to a natural disaster, it’s been compared to the great recession. But the truth is, what we face today is all of those things and none of those things at the exact same time. We’ve never shut down the global economy for weeks at a time to fight a new highly infectious disease for which there is no cure. What we do know is that if we move forward prematurely, if we do not insure all of the health indicators, testing supplies and contact capacity are at robust sustainable levels before we transition back, then we will inevitably find ourselves facing a second wave.”
While the financial figures were not in yet, Gov. Kelly said she expected that they will start to see the effect of having shuttered large parts of the economy.
Gov. Kelly announced that Kansas has received additional personal protective equipment for southwest Kansas, after she discussed the need for additional equipment and testing supplies with President Trump last Thursday. The supplies and equipment will go to Finney, Ford, Lyon and Seward counties.
There are some outbreaks in communities with meat processing plants in western Kansas, in the Dodge City area, and they also are concerned about a meat processing facility in the Emporia, Kansas, area. The facilities have modified production and shipping procedures, she said. There has been an increase in temperature and health screenings, enhanced sanitation and social distancing. Ford County, where Dodge City is located, reported 180 positive COVID-19 cases on Monday.
According to state officials, the plants in southwest Kansas account for 25 to 30 percent of the country’s beef processing.
Kansas received additional testing equipment and personal protective equipment that will be used in western Kansas, Gov. Kelly said. She said both Sen. Pat Roberts and Sen. Moran had been invaluable advocates for the state in Washington, D.C.
They also are working with federal agencies on a long-term state testing plan.
Gov. Kelly said some of the personal protective equipment coming in from private donors did not go through the state office, but was sent directly to local hospitals. She said the state needed to know the numbers of protective equipment on hand in order to know what is needed to order in the future.
In other areas of the state, Johnson County reported 377 cases; Sedgwick County (Wichita area), 248; Leavenworth County, 135; Shawnee County (Topeka area), 92; Seward County, 79; Coffey County, 47; Douglas County (Lawrence area), 43; Lyon County, 39; Finney County, 38; and Riley County (Manhattan area), 26.
To see the governor’s news conference, visit https://www.facebook.com/GovLauraKelly/videos/521688092071137/.
The Kansas COVID-19 resource page is at https://govstatus.egov.com/coronavirus.
The UG’s COVID-19 webpage is athttps://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information.
New cases statewide were in blue and total cases in yellow. (KDHE graph) This chart showed symptom onset data in blue and date diagnosed in yellow. (KDHE graph)
The Unified Government COVID-19 page reported 426 positive cases and a total 44 deaths on Monday. (From UG COVID-19 webpage) A graph from the UG COVID-19 webpage showed the number of COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County. (From UG COVID-19 webpage)
In-person mass protests not a good idea, doctors say
Wyandotte County reported more positive COVID-19 cases and more COVID-19 deaths on Monday morning. (UG COVID-19 website)
Doctors at the University of Kansas Health System on Monday encouraged people to keep staying home, keep social distancing and practice good hygiene.
Testing will find out how many people have had the disease in the community, Dr. Steven Stites, chief medical officer at the KU Health System, said. Currently health experts are guessing that perhaps 80 to 95 percent of the people haven’t had it. Testing would give them a better idea of the number.
“The majority of people have not had the virus, so they’re still susceptible of getting it,” Dr. Stites said. “When you start opening up society, and don’t do shelter in place, what changes?”
What changes is people have more social contacts, go out, meet together, stop social distancing, and spread the virus more, he said. Then they are back where they started, with hospitals being overwhelmed and more people dying.
“The virus is best mitigated by a strategy to test a lot of people,” he said.
Then they find positive cases, find the people who were in contact with positive patients, and isolate those persons so they can’t infect others, he said.
“That’s why when we think about reopening society, we have to do it thoughtfully and logically,” he said.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control at KU Health System, said if not done in a thoughtful manner, there could be exponential growth, with vulnerable populations getting it, and they would be back to where they started.
Dr. Stites said leaders and medical experts need to work together to determine a way of reopening society in a thoughtful manner.
Wyandotte County reported 420 positive cases and 40 deaths at 11 a.m. Monday, according to the Unified Government’s COVID-19 website.
The current barrier to testing, according to Dr. Hawkinson, is a shortage of the type of biologic swabs that are needed. Lab capacity for testing in the state also could be a barrier.
The University of Kansas Health System reported that the number of positive COVID-19 patients on Monday at the hospital had decreased, compared to Friday’s numbers.
On Friday, there were 36 positive patients there, with 15 in the intensive care unit. On Monday, the hospital reported 24 inpatients, with 11 in the ICU, according to Dr. Hawkinson. They are monitoring another 13 patients for COVID-19. Overall, 59 recovering COVID-19 patients have been discharged from KU Health System.
Dr. Damien Stevens, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the KU Health System, recently returned from New York, where he was a week on the front lines helping other doctors care for an overwhelming number of patients. He is currently self-quarantining at home.
Dr. Stevens said at a KU Health System news conference today that outside, New York looked like a ghost town, while inside the hospitals, it was overwhelming, the front lobby was packed and several other areas were packed.
He worked at a 400-bed hospital where 80 to 90 percent of the patients were COVID-19 related, he said. About 100 were on ventilators, while only half of those were in the ICU, he said. Rooms were converted in other areas of the hospital to take care of the COVID-19 patients, he said.
The hospitals had a great need for nurses and respiratory therapists, he said. The usual ratio is 2-to-1 or 1-to-1 patients to nurses in the ICU, but often, the ratio during this crisis was 8-to-1, he said. There was a patient-to-nurse ratio on the floor of about 10-to-1, he said. The nurses were working 12-hour shifts.
With other hospitals awaiting a surge, some did not want to accept transfers from other hospitals, he said. It was difficult to triage and coordinate with different cities and different health systems, across a large area, he said.
It was sad to see patients who could say goodbye to their family members only through an iPad, as visitors were not allowed into the rooms, he said.
From a medical standpoint, there were a lot of patients in a medical drug trial, and they will be able to learn from it later, he said.
Dr. Hawkinson said although the health system here has not been overwhelmed like New York, they have been close to a shortage in medications that ease the pain for patients on ventilators.
Dr. Hawkinson said testing is important in reopening society. KU Health System is relying on a test that will identify active positive cases, and keep those households self-quarantined to stop further infections.
There are questions currently about serology, or antibody testing, he said. These tests will show how much the virus has already affected the region. Some of the questions currently about these tests are if they are effective, and if there is enough testing material, he said.
There are questions about whether the tests are specific enough for this COVID-19 infection as compared to another coronavirus infection, he said. There also are questions about whether people can get coronavirus again, he said. There are no absolute answers to that at this time.
Dr. Stites said COVID-19 has spread through large groups, including meatpacking plants, nursing homes and churches, places that have close contact.
If the disease quickly runs through a nursing home where people are close together, it could just as easily run quickly through a meatpacking plant where people are close together, Dr. Hawkinson said.
“That will really cause a problem if we don’t open up in a slow, thoughtful manner,” he said. They don’t want the supply chain to be held back because of a lack of people to work there.
Dr. Stites said some of the models now show that this area was reaching its peak on April 19, but other models still showed a later date.
Doctors have serious reservations about large public gatherings to protest the stay-at-home orders. There have been reports of some protests planned in the Greater Kansas City area.
Dr. Stites said the problem with large public gatherings is people are probably not six feet away from each other, and they probably won’t do the other things necessary, such as use hand sanitizer and cough into their sleeves.
It didn’t work in meatpacking plants, nursing homes and churches where people were close together, he said.
“Here’s the overwhelming evidence: If you’re going to stay safe, you can’t stay in a crowd,” he said. “Can you think of a worse way to make your point than to watch a lot of people get infected?”
Dr. Stites said everyone wants to reopen society. If people want to protest, they might protest to help them get tests, but they shouldn’t protest in a mass gathering, according to Dr. Stites.
“Help us call attention to the need for taking care of people the right way, so we don’t end up with a 8-to 10-to-1 nursing ratio,” he said. “That should scare you.”
Dr. Hawkinson said chances are, if a person is close to a lot of other people in a crowd, the virus will probably land on some of those people. The novel coronavirus can be spread by coughing and sneezing, and also by breathing around others.
Some people do not show symptoms while they have the virus in its early days, according to Dr. Stites.
“The more premature that we open, the more patients will die,” Dr. Stevens said.
To view the KU doctors’ news conference, visit https://www.facebook.com/kuhospital/videos/364647944440238/.
The UG’s COVID-19 webpage is athttps://alpha.wycokck.org/Coronavirus-COVID-19-Information.
The Kansas COVID-19 resource page is at https://govstatus.egov.com/coronavirus.
Sixty-eight Kansas counties reported positive COVID-19 cases on Sunday. (KDHE map) A KDHE graph showed the new Kansas cases in blue and the total cases reported in yellow. (KDHE graph)
Fifty-nine new positive COVID-19 cases were reported on Sunday, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
The total number of statewide positive cases were 1,849 on Sunday.
There were 12 more COVID-19 deaths reported statewide on Sunday, for a total of 98, according to KDHE statistics.
Wyandotte County reported 37 total deaths on Sunday, an increase of two deaths since Saturday’s figures, according to the Unified Government COVID-19 website.
The KDHE COVID-19 website said Wyandotte County had 417 positive cases, while the UG COVID-19 website on Sunday stated Wyandotte County had 403 COVID-19 cases. Wyandotte County had the most positive cases in the state.
According to the KDHE website, 68 Kansas counties had reported positive cases on Sunday.
On Sunday, Johnson County had 372 cases; Sedgwick County, the Wichita area, 234; Leavenworth County, 128; Ford County, the Dodge City area, 127; Shawnee County, the Topeka area, 90 cases; Coffey County, 47 cases; Seward County, 47 cases; Douglas County, the Lawrence area, 43; Lyon County, 38 cases; Finney County, 35 cases; Riley County, the Manhattan area, 26 cases; and Labette County, 20 cases.
