800 new COVID cases this week; Sedgwick County bulking up tracing staff, air purifiers
Faced with 800 new cases of COVID-19 this week, Sedgwick County will be hiring 52 new employees for testing and contact tracing.
County Commissioners also approved spending more than $800,000 for air-purification systems in 22 county facilities to try to limit the spread of the virus in public buildings.
Both those expenses will be funded with federal dollars from the county’s $99 million allocation under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.
Of the new positions, 28 will be contract tracers and supervisors.
They do the work of contacting people who test positive for the coronavirus and trying to figure out where they got it and who else in their circle could be at risk.
The other 24 new hires will be phone operators and team leaders to answer the incoming calls and schedule COVID-19 testing.
The need for more investigators is critical and has arisen quickly, county officials said.
As of Thursday, the Health Department had 30 people calling to trace contacts and schedule testing appointments.
“They are nowhere (near) on top of everything with 800 additional cases since Monday,” said Lindsay Poe Rousseau, the county’s chief financial officer.
The county will be working with temporary staffing service providers to fill those jobs until the CARES funding expires on Dec. 31.
It’s not known yet if the federal government will provide further funding to continue the jobs after the end of December.
The commission also voted unanimously to equip 22 Wichita-area county facilities with “bipolar ionization” air purifier units to scrub coronavirus out of the shared airspace.
Poe Rousseau said the purifiers serve two functions:
▪ They cause individual coronavirus particles to cluster together into larger particles that can be captured in air filters.
▪ They rupture the outer membranes of individual viruses, rendering them harmless.
“It makes it so . . . the bad stuff can’t get through,” Poe Rousseau said.
The new units will be installed at county facilities with high public or employee traffic.
Some of those facilities include: adult and juvenile courthouses and detention facilities, license tag offices, the COMCARE mental-health crisis center, the Extension Office and the Ronald Reagan Building.
CARES act funding for the improvements will cost $823,960.
The contract will be no-bid.
With only 47 days until CARES funding expires, the county doesn’t have time to bid the projects out and get the bills paid before the Dec. 31 deadline, Poe Rousseau said.
Negotiations with WSU stall
The county’s negotiations with Wichita State University to use its newly built Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory for bulk testing has stalled because the university has not provided the “bare minimum” information required to receive CARES Act federal funding, according to the Poe Rousseau.
The Sedgwick County Commission approved $4 million for the testing facility in September, but stipulated that the money should not be spent until WSU provides information showing it followed county and state procurement rules and detailing what the money is for.
The WSU lab has promised the county that it would provide results to patients within 24 to 48 hours. It is already processing thousands of tests a day, county officials said, including samples taken from WSU students and athletes.
But without an agreement with the county, the health department has to send samples out of town to southeast Kansas, Topeka or the Kansas City area, delaying when people find out whether they have COVID-19.
Poe Rousseau said one of the major snags is that the university has not been able to tell the county its funding sources for the lab and how the money is being spent.
Sedgwick County would provide $4 million in federal funds to WSU. In exchange, the county would be able to send bulk COVID-19 test samples to the lab for roughly $35 a test — much lower than the $90-a-test rate the county pays to contract with a lab in Lenexa.
A majority of the commission — Jim Howell, Michael O’Donnell and Pete Meitzner — signaled Thursday that they are willing to approve the $4 million disbursement to the university whether it provides the information required for federal funding or not.
Meitzner, the commission chair, said the county should give WSU until Wednesday to provide the information.
If the money for the lab is found to be ineligible under federal law, Commissioner Howell said, the county could cover the expense using money from the general fund.
“This $4 million is probably the best $4 million we could ever spend,” Howell said. “This is so important, nothing else trumps this. I’m willing to take a little bit of a risk to lean forward and get this going as soon as possible, even if I have to find the money somewhere else in the budget.”
Commissioners Lacey Cruse and David Dennis said the other commissioners should follow Poe Rousseau’s guidance and not do something that could cause problems in the future if the county gets audited.
“My biggest worry is that the comments that have been made are now putting it on our staff to take some action that our staff is not comfortable with, and it is not putting any pressure on WSU to comply with the needs of the county,” Dennis said. “So I truly believe that we need this testing moving, but I want to make sure that our comments don’t send the wrong signal to WSU that well, we don’t have to worry about it anymore because the board of county commissioners is going to send the money no matter what we do.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 3:43 PM.
