Kansas City metro adds 64 new coronavirus cases on Friday and five more deaths
Sixty-four new cases of the coronavirus and five more deaths were reported Friday in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
The area encompassing Kansas City and Jackson, Clay and Platte counties in Missouri and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas has recorded 3,196 cases, of which 158 resulted in death.
On Wednesday, 48 new COVID-19 cases were reported and on Thursday, 46 were identified.
The five recent deaths occurred in Kansas City, Johnson County and Wyandotte County.
On Friday, Kansas City began allowing dine-in services and other businesses such as gyms to reopen.
Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said the public should continue to practice personal responsibility.
“As you make your choices about what you need to do versus what you want to do, remember that there is a difference between need and want,” Stites said. “We all want to get back out there. But we have people we love and people we care about and who care about us. We have families and parents and friends who mean a lot. When you take care of yourself, you take care of all those folks, too, so make good choices.”
Earlier this week, officials with the health system held a teleconference with Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Stites said they discussed a coronavirus vaccine.
“Every now and then, you get kind of emotional around COVID-19 and the toll it’s taken,” Stites said. “When the head of the NIH says, ‘We may have vaccination in October,’ I started to cry.”
Stites said the vaccine process has been expedited by combining development phases.
A trial will begin this summer and results could be released by September. If it’s found to be effective, doses may be distributed as early as October.
“I think they’ve already been through the animal results, etc., and had some good-looking results,” Stites said. “That is a remarkable timeline.”
On Friday, Kansas reported 7,886 cases including 172 deaths. Another 53,706 tests have been negative.
Missouri confirmed 10,456 cases including 576 deaths. A total of 134,458 tests have been conducted.
Nationwide, more than 1.4 million people have contracted the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.
