Not a great outlook, from some of the local KC doctors...
Kansas City could see Seattle-like numbers of COVID-19 cases in two weeks, doctors warn
The Kansas City metro area’s coronavirus outbreak could be as severe as Seattle’s within two weeks, public health experts warn.
“This isn’t a maybe. It is coming,” Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control at The University of Kansas Health System, told reporters Thursday morning.
As of Thursday, the Pacific Northwest city reports 1,187 positive cases and 66 deaths. The Kansas City metro area has experienced 27 cases and 1 death.
“That’s why it is so vitally important to continue to have adherence to public health guidance,” Hawkinson said.
If you can, stay home. If you’re sick, self-quarantine. Don’t meet in large groups. Wash your hands, cover your mouth with your elbow when you cough and keep a healthy distance from other people. That’s the message that needs to be getting to the general public, Hawkinson said.
How long Americans can expect to hunker down depends on how seriously they take the virus right now, Hawkinson said. There’s no COVID-19 vaccine and the likelihood of re-infection isn’t well understood at this time.
“We’re at the beginning of the curve,” Hawkinson said. “We haven’t even started having that many positive patients. What we have is a whole lot of rule-outs and a whole lot of people coming in contact with positive patients.”
Hawkinson said he’s been monitoring the situation in Seattle and preparing for that level of infection in the Kansas City area.
“You can feel what’s going on on the ground (in Seattle) and you can look at that and you could say they are two weeks ahead of us,” Hawkinson said.
“This is what it’s going to look like in Kansas and Kansas City in two weeks,” he said. “And everything you can try to do to try and flatten that is what you have to do.”
And if it gets as bad as Seattle, Kansas hospitals won’t have enough supplies to go around.
“If we don’t blunt this virus, we don’t have enough,” said Jill Chadwick, director of KU Medical Center’s media relations.
“We don’t have enough vents, and we don’t have enough beds. And not just at our hospital — but every hospital,” she said.
A testing shortage and backlog of test samples make it impossible to accurately report how many people in Kansas have been infected.
More people want tests than the medical facilities, state labs or private labs can handle, chief medical offiicer at KU Medical Center Steve Stites said.
“We just don’t have enough test kits,” Stites said.
Johnson County, which includes the Kansas City suburbs of Overland Park, Shawnee and Olathe, has the most cases of COVID-19 in Kansas with 16 as of Thursday. There are eight cases in Wyandotte County.
With a shortage of testing capacity, Kansas should assume the virus is spreading more rapidly than tests indicate. The public health response should be the same whether people are being tested or not: If you have symptoms, self-quarantine two weeks, Hawkinson said.
“You just have to assume. You have to stay home as if you have it,” Hawkinson said.