More COVID-19 cases, deaths reported in KC area, but expert says curve is flattening
Seven more people in the Kansas City metropolitan area have died from the new coronavirus, according to data released Tuesday.
Fifty-four more COVID-19 cases have been identified in the area that includes Kansas City, Jackson, Clay and Platte counties on the Missouri side and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas.
Four of the new deaths were Kansas City residents.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said Monday night that the city had its first line of duty death from COVID-19. Billy Birmingham started with the Metropolitan Ambulance Service in 1998 and had been an EMT with the Kansas City Fire Department for the past 10 years.
The other three new deaths in the metro occurred in Wyandotte and Johnson counties.
The Kansas City area has recorded 1,328 cases, including 63 deaths.
Though the total number of cases continues to rise, Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said it appears that the virus’s curve has begun to flatten in the Kansas City area.
“There are some of the researchers and epidemiologists here at KU and other places saying we may have seen the peak of the curve. I don’t know if that’s really true or not,” he said. “But the point being, we have clearly flattened it. So that’s really good news. But we’ve also flattened it without a lot of people having gotten that sick yet. We’re nowhere near what’s happened in New York.”
More than 10,000 people in New York have died from the virus, according to the Associated Press.
“What has happened is folks have sheltered in place, stayed at home, maintained their distance, which we’ve wanted you to do,” Stites said. “It was absolutely the right thing to do because if we didn’t our health care systems would have been overwhelmed and we would have had a lot bigger problem on our hand.”
On Tuesday, Kansas reported 1,426 cases while Missouri said it has seen 4,686 cases.
