KDHE Shifting Gears On Public Report Of Site-Specific COVID-19 Clusters In Kansas

By Tim Carpenter, The Kansas Reflector

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Sept. 23, 2020

TOPEKA — The Kansas Department of Health and Environment prepared to release a retooled list Wednesday of site-specific COVID-19 clusters that identified outbreaks of five cases or more occurring within the previous 14 days.

The original format for the KDHE report launched Sept. 9 defined clusters as businesses with at least 20 cases or as events and groups linked to five cases or more. It also included outbreaks that added as few as one new case within the prior 28 days. Those thresholds were questioned by journalists as insufficient and denounced by businesses as excessive.

In response, KDHE eliminated the distinction for purposes of this report — setting the benchmark in the new version at five regardless of locale.

“Somebody, let’s say, has eight cases today and then a week from now to have it down to four or less and then to no longer be on the list,” said Lee Norman, secretary of KDHE said in an interview with the Kansas Reflector. “I think that’s a more realistic way to inform people so they can make choices.”

In addition, KDHE decided to focus more attention on real-time situations by concentrating on COVID-19 outbreaks within the previous 14 days. The agency came under criticism for listing clusters that began months ago and resulted in significant exposures to the virus but had been reduced to a trickle. As a consequence, the report’s list of businesses with clusters will shrink.

“What we feel like we’ve done is modified it to really meet the needs of people looking at the list,” Norman said. “We’re doing it and customizing essentially for the purposes that we think the public will benefit from the most.”

On Wednesday, KDHE reported an additional 21 fatalities linked to coronavirus since Monday. Nine of the 21 resulted from the agency’s ongoing effort to reconcile death notifications disclosed by health providers with official causes of death in documents filed with KDHE. Since the virus began spreading in March, Kansas has recorded 621 deaths tied to COVID-19.

The agency said 1,267 new cases of coronavirus in Kansas had been identified through testing since Monday to put the statewide total at 55,226.

Norman said a central purpose of KDHE was public safety and the agency’s goal during the pandemic was to be transparent with information useful to people.

During a legislative committee hearing, Sen. Mike Thompson, a Republican from Shawnee, said the state’s emergency management law should be amended to prevent a governor from ever ordering businesses to shut down.

The Kansas recovery rate of people with COVID-19 is nearly 100%, Thompson said, a far cry from the 6% initially predicted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That’s a pretty infinitesimally small number of people who actually died from COVID,” Thompson said. “At what point do we say, OK, it’s a small enough number that we could call off this emergency?”

The normal flu season “kills a lot of people, too,” Thompson said. “Actually, it’s probably more identifiable that the deaths are from flu rather than the COVID from all the data that I’ve seen.”

Will Lawrence, chief of staff to Gov. Laura Kelly, said the administration would continue to take the advice of medical professionals “on that front.”

“I don’t think there should be any expectation that this is going to be over anytime soon,” Lawrence said.

The Kansas Reflector seeks to increase people's awareness of how decisions made by elected representatives and other public servants affect our day-to-day lives. We hope to empower and inspire greater participation in democracy throughout Kansas.