TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Nursing homes make up nearly half of the places in Kansas linked to active coronavirus clusters of five or more cases and some of them still are struggling to find testing supplies despite heightened federal testing requirements, a state official told legislators.
The state Department of Health and Environment has resumed its weekly reports on specific coronavirus clusters. It started releasing the data on Sept. 9 but paused it for a week because the first reports included weeks-old cases in the counts for businesses and other places that still had active ones. The latest report, issued Wednesday, lists places that have had five or more active cases within the past 14 days, and only the cases in which symptoms started during that period, not a long-term cumulative total.
The latest health department report lists 29 clusters, including 14 that are tied to nursing homes in 11 counties. Together, the 29 clusters account for 316 cases, including 169, or 53%, that were in nursing homes.
The state has 211 active clusters accounting for about 8,000 of the more than 55,000 confirmed and probable coronavirus cases that Kansas has reported since the pandemic reached the state in early March. Active clusters account for 128 of the 621 reported COVID-19-related deaths reported by the state health department since the pandemic began.
The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Kansas has risen over the past two weeks, from 496 new cases per day on Sept. 9 to 622 per day on Wednesday. That last figure represented the biggest spike in new Kansas cases since the pandemic began.
Meanwhile, Scott Brunner, a deputy secretary at the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, told a joint legislative budget committee Wednesday that some nursing homes were struggling to meet a federal benchmark requiring homes in more than half the state’s counties to test staff at least once a week because of the spread of the coronavirus locally, The Topeka Capital Journal reported. Brunner blamed lags in the supply chain.
“It’s a little bit of a mixed bag but I agree that the resourcing element is a concern, and we’ve certainly heard that and want to keep figuring out the best way to meet that,” Brunner said.