Sedgwick County may have peaked on COVID-19, health officer says
Sedgwick County appears to have passed its peak for coronavirus infections, but there’s a long road back to normal, the county’s top doctor said Friday.
“Fortunately, the hospitals think they have seen the peak, although the peak is very flat,” said Garold Minns, dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita. “They (local hospital administrators) are feeling good about the fact that we are not going to have a huge surge” of new COVID-19 cases.
Daily hospitalizations numbers have not been made available in Sedgwick County during the pandemic.
Local hospital systems Ascension Via Christi and Wesley Healthcare have been guarded with their daily hospitalization data, citing patient privacy issues. Sedgwick County reports on its online dashboard that 66 people of the 316 who tested positive have been hospitalized for COVID-19 since the disease was first detected in Wichita on March 19.
As the county health officer, Minns wields substantial control over the local response to contagious diseases.
He made his comments during a meeting of county, city and business leaders aimed at starting to formulate guidelines for reopening businesses shuttered by the pandemic.
“I think they’re feeling more comfortable that you can move ahead now,” he said. “That’s very good news I heard from them.”
However, he cautioned that doesn’t mean business as usual will be returning to the community any time soon.
“Like any patient recovering from an injury, our community has had an injury,” he said. “Our patients who are in the hospital with Covid-19 pneumonia who survive do not jump out of bed and run a marathon. It takes some time to recover and our community is going to take time to recover.
“This has been a traumatic incident for our community.”
He pointed out that the last pandemic of this magnitude was the 1918 Spanish Flu.
That disease started in rural Kansas and traveled around the globe, carried by soldiers tapped to fight World War I.
”No one is an expert in bringing a community back from a pandemic,” Minns said. “I don’t think we have too many people around from that era to help us figure out how to do this.
“I think we’re going to have some missteps; I think we’re going to have a lot of right steps.”
Sedgwick County Commission Chair Pete Meitzner said it’s good news for the community.
Many in Wichita have struggled with a stay-at-home order designed to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic and ensure that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed like they have been in New York and in some countries overseas.
Meitzner said Minns is “the second person who has confirmed” to him that the pandemic has peaked here.
“So it (the economy) is ready to start recovery, and let’s get you guys (business people) open as best we can as safe as we can,” he said.
This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 2:58 PM.
