Kansas counties at CDC’s high COVID level drops to 0 as state reports 1.3K new cases
No Kansas counties are at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s high COVID-19 community level this week, after 11 were at high last week.
Twelve counties are at medium as of Thursday’s update, and Sedgwick County remains at low for another week.
The counties at medium level are Clark, Grant, Stanton, Ness, Osborne, Mitchell, Jewell, Washington, Marshall, Leavenworth, Wyandotte and Cherokee.
The CDC updates the metric each Thursday for U.S. counties and bases the assessment on the number of new cases and hospitalizations per 100,000 people (seven-day totals) and the percent of staffed hospital beds occupied by COVID-positive patients (a seven-day average).
In counties at high, the CDC recommends wearing a mask in public, indoor settings. That recommendation extends to medium-level counties for those at greater risk for severe illness.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has 10 counties at a high incident rate this week, meaning those areas are experiencing 100 or more cases per 100,000 in population.
Sedgwick County is at the department’s “moderate” rate, which means it’s seeing 10 to 49 positive cases in a population of 100,000. Eighteen counties are labeled as low.
There were 1,366 new cases and 27 new deaths reported in the state from March 8 to March 15, according to the KDHE.
Sedgwick County’s positive test rate sits at 7.6% as of March 16, according to the county’s health department. The rate accounts for the 14-day average of recorded positives over the total number administered and does not include at-home tests and those not reported to the Sedgwick County Health Department.
There have been 91 positive COVID-19 cases reported in the county in the last seven days, and the prior week there were 126. The most reported in a single day during the latest reporting week was 22 on March 13. There have been about 1,300 negative tests reported to the health department in the same period.
See Sedgwick County’s COVID dashboard below, which updated with the latest data every Friday.
