Sedgwick County has 9,773 COVID-19 sampling kits, but it still limits who gets tested

Sedgwick County has 9,733 COVID-19 sampling kits and plans to start random testing across the county in a couple of weeks. But in the meantime the county continues to limit to whom it will offer free testing during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our emphasis continues to be on individuals that have COVID-19 symptoms,” said Tim Kaufman, deputy county manager.

“Those symptoms include a fever, persistent dry cough, shortness of breath, chest tightness, chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, loss of taste or smell and a new one is unexplained diarrhea,” he said.

Sedgwick County remains a bottom-dweller in coronavirus testing compared to other counties with large outbreaks in Kansas, which as a state has one of the lowest testing rates in the country.

As of Wednesday, 13.65 out of every 100,000 people in Sedgwick County had been tested. That’s the lowest of any county with more than 100 cases.

Besides the 9,733 sampling kits on hand, the county also has 10,000 ordered that could arrive at any time, Kaufman said.

There’s no shortage of people who want to get tested, as seen by the line of cars at the first free testing site in the county.

Since opening on Monday afternoon, HealthCore Clinic’s mobile site at the Wichita State University Metropolitan Complex near 29th and Oliver has had more people wanting to be tested than the site has capacity to sample.

The only people without symptoms who currently can get tested by the Sedgwick County Health Department are first responders, law enforcement, healthcare workers, meat-packing-plant workers and employees who work in residential group settings, such as the jail, group homes and long-term-care facilities.

Soon, the county wants to start a random testing program to “provide us with statistically significant data that will help us understand the virus in the community,” Kaufman said.

But first the county will need to hire a contractor to identify who gets tested so it’s truly a random representative sample population, Kaufman said.

“We’re going to need to contract with an organization that can identify a randomized representative testing pool, make those calls and get folks scheduled,” Kaufman said. “But we’ve already been in contact with two different organizations that do that kind of work and we’re going to continue to do that until we can find someone that can help us make those calls for a randomized data set.

“We hope to have that ready to go in a couple of weeks,” he said.

In addition to the random testing, the county also plans to set up its own mobile testing capabilities, so it can make testing more accessible to communities outside of Wichita.

“I still think that we need some mobile testing equipment, some type of motor home or something that we can get out to where the people are because our county is so big and one of the biggest clusters we had was down in Clearwater,” Commissioner David Dennis said.

The Clearwater cluster broke out at the Clearwater Nursing and Rehabilitation Center last month. A total of 61 people associated with the nursing home have been infected with the coronavirus and eight have died.

It’s 18.5 miles from the nursing home to the Sedgwick County Health Department’s testing site at 2716 W. Central.

Michael O’Donnell said the idea of taking the testing sites outside of Wichita was “brilliant.”

“Sort of like what the Red Cross does when they go out on their mobile blood drives,” he said. “It makes a whole lot of sense to me because that way it can serve every point in the county, and the amount of people will be drastically better-served because we would have that, and people wouldn’t have to drive very far if we went into all of the smaller communities as well.”

The county also is looking to do a hiring blitz to fight COVID-19. It has already hired two temporary epidemiologists, and on Wednesday the commission approved hiring an additional 47 temporary staff members.

The 47 temporary workers would fill 20 jobs related to testing such as nursing staff, 12 contact tracers to track down the places infected people have traveled and who they have been in contact with, 12 support positions for coordination, eight administrative support positions tied to logistics and acquisitions and five data analysts to provide data to county government and the public.

Kaufman said the positions would run until the end of 2020 but could be extended. They would be funded with CARES Act funding, a federal relief package providing $99.6 million to Sedgwick County. The commission approved $1.8 million for the temporary positions.

The county has had more than 100 people working on its COVID-19 response. But many of those employees have been pulled from other county duties. The new positions will help put those people back to work on their regular assignments, Kaufman said.

“Adrenaline will carry you for quite a while, but at some point in time you have to recognize that we need to settle in for the long haul and we need to add some staff so that we can fully support that,” Kaufman said.

This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 5:00 PM.