Kansas City area ‘way under’ COVID testing goal as health leaders worry about surge
A leading medical officer said there’s still not enough testing for the novel coronavirus being done in the Kansas City area and the potential for a surge of new cases exists as stay-at-home orders begin lifting.
Allen Greiner, medical officer for Wyandotte County, said this week that testing for COVID-19 remains far below goals discussed earlier in the pandemic.
“We’re probably way under the goal we need for the region, where we should probably be doing about 20,000 tests a week in the metro,” Greiner said. “We’ve only done 40,000 some total that we can find in any of the data that’s coming back to us. There’s a huge need to expand this.”
In a followup email, Greiner said a combination of issues — lack of test kits, limited lab capacity and lack of funding — have contributed to a shortcoming in testing.
“The lack of our region to meet the daily 150 tests/100,000 people in an area (as recommended by many public health experts) is multi-factorial,” Greiner said. “It relates to a long term lack of public health infrastructure. It relates to a patchwork system for obtaining testing supplies, swabs, PPE and for processing the tests in public and private labs.”
He also said public health officials expect a surge of new cases in a week or two because of the phased reopening of activity restrictions that were placed by local governments in an attempt to slow the spread of a virus that has killed 192 people in the nine-county Kansas City metro area.
Greiner’s comments came during a biweekly call of regional government and health leaders arranged by the Mid-America Regional Council.
The comments followed a Memorial Day weekend in which Missouri grabbed national headlines for images broadcast from the Lake of the Ozarks where packed crowds could be seen partying without following social distancing guidelines.
The gatherings prompted enough concern from Kansas officials that Lee Norman, Kansas Department of Health and Environment secretary, recommended that visitors to the Lake of the Ozarks from last weekend take measures to quarantine themselves, calling the behavior of partygoers “reckless.”
Then on Wednesday Norman said he was worried that, as counties across Kansas reopened, a second wave of coronavirus infections could undo months of progress.
He warned that if mass gatherings were allowed without social distancing, “we’re going to see an increase and perhaps a startling increase in the number of cases.”
Stay-at-home orders and other precautions were implemented by local governments in mid-March as coronavirus infections made their way to the Midwest. Public health officials have credited those measures for slowing the spread of the virus and avoiding a surge of infections requiring hospitalizations.
Steven Hoeger, director of safety and emergency management at Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, said area hospitals are slowly and cautiously resuming services that had previously been put off due to the pandemic.
“I think most of the hospitals are starting to open up their operating rooms to essential services,” Hoeger said. “...Very few hospitals, if any, are doing any elective surgeries.”
Hoeger said hospitals still encounter challenges in obtaining supplies of personal protective equipment.
