Here’s what we know about coronavirus testing numbers in the Kansas City region
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As the new coronavirus continues to spread across the United States, halting the normal lives of thousands, much of the public conversation nationally and in the Kansas City region has focused on testing for the virus.
By Tuesday afternoon at least 127 people in Kansas and 356 in Missouri had tested positive for the virus. Of those, three people in Kansas and eight people in Missouri had died.
More than 2,000 people in Kansas were tested. Of those, about 5% tested positive.
Last week, Kansas health officials announced that testing would be reduced in Johnson County, the area with the most confirmed cases, because the disease was spreading within the community and testing supplies were limited.
Health officials and experts have said this change is a result of scarce testing resources in the country and such policy will make it harder to understand where and who is most impacted by the disease.
“We’ve not had enough test materials all along the way,” Lee Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said Wednesday. “We’ve run short.”
He added that the state is dependent on the federal government for resources.
As the number of reported cases continues to rise, it is not always clear whether the numbers reflect an increase in sick people or an increase in testing. That distinction can be important for understanding the scope of the problem and how quickly the disease is spreading.
Here’s what we know so far about COVID-19 tests in the Kansas City region.
Kansas
Each day the Kansas Department of Health and Education publishes a public update with data on COVID-19 cases.
As of Tuesday that update included the number of positive cases broken down by county and whether they were confirmed in a state or private lab.
With the exception of the reports from March 18 through March 23, the report also includes details on the number of negative results found at state and private labs.
Because of the gap, it is unclear at this point how quickly the state is increasing its testing capacity. Between March 17 and March 24 the number of tests run increased by more than 500%.
In the most recent report, Kansas had 127 positive tests and 2,360 negative tests from the state lab and private labs.
77 of the positive tests were confirmed in a private lab. The state did not disclose what proportion of negative tests were confirmed in private labs.
The state currently has the ability to run about 900 tests in the public lab and is going through between 150 and 200 each day, Lee, the health department secretary, said in a news conference Wednesday.
Missouri
In Missouri testing protocols were adjusted this week based on CDC guidelines.
Tests are available for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 symptoms, symptomatic residents of senior living facilities, the immunocompromised, who are at higher risk for poor outcomes, and health care workers and others who show symptoms after contact with a suspected COVID-19 patient.
As of Tuesday 660 tests had been performed at state labs in Missouri.
Officials said about 8% of those came back positive. By Wednesday 356 people had tested positive for the disease. The majority of those tests were conducted in private labs.
The percent of tests in Missouri that come back positive is not something that can be accurately calculated with available information.
The state maintains a dashboard of case information listing county and age breakdowns. However, it does not list negative test results from the state lab. And, more than half of the positive results have come from private labs.
The labs — Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp and Viracor — report only their positive tests to the state health department. Therefore, the state does not have an accurate count of how many residents have been tested for the virus and what proportion of those tests were positive.
When reached by The Star, the labs could not provide state by state breakdowns on how many tests had been performed.
24 out of 29 positive tests in Kansas City, Missouri were tested by a private lab.
Private labs
Three labs are performing COVID-19 tests for the state of Missouri.
Quest Diagnostics, which has 12 labs performing tests, including one in Lenexa, said in a news release this week that the company should be able to perform 30,000 tests a day by the end of the week.
LabCorp, which operates a lab in Missouri, can currently perform more than 20,000 tests per day nationwide.
Viracor, which operates in Missouri along with its sister lab, Diatherix, in Alabama, can currently run 5,000 tests each day.
According to the Kansas City department of health spokeswoman, Michelle Pekarsky, hospitals are beginning to develop in-house testing capacity. Health care providers need approval to send a test to state labs but not to send a test to private labs.
Turnaround time between tests and results varies in state and private labs ranging from 24 hours to three or four days.
This story was originally published March 25, 2020 at 5:08 PM.
