By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — With the significant cluster of COVID-19 cases at Hutchinson Correctional Facility announced this week, it's important to differentiate those who are incarcerated from those who work there and go home to their families in the community, but to do so without making it too easy to figure out which employees are ill.
"We're working to integrate those staff members," said Reno County Health Department Director Nick Baldetti. "We would count them and through epidemiological investigation, in terms of where we think they got it, through the specific investigation with each one of those individuals. Those staff members, we're counting within the community aggregate data that we would apply to just community trend analysis, because those individuals do live in our community."
With that said, the Kansas Department of Corrections release said that the people that were infected in the prison are asymptomatic. The concern is that even asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus, if in close contact long enough.
"If there's an individual who is presenting physical symptoms, coughing, fever, bowel issues, that's the highest risk factor in terms of spread and exposure," Baldetti said. "That's followed by presymptomatic and presymptomatic again is different than asymptomatic, in that presymptomatic just means that you haven't presented your symptoms yet, but the individual who is positive at some point presents symptoms, versus an asymptomatic individual are those that never present a symptom. They are just actively carrying the virus and never would know that they are sick. In that order, it's truly symptomatic, presymptomatic and asymptomatic in terms of risk."
From an epidemiological perspective, the two days immediately prior to symptoms are the days with most risk of spread other than those days once symptoms present.
"You shouldn't necessarily be terribly concerned with walking by an asymptomatic individual in Walmart as you pass through an aisle. You really have to spend some time in an enclosed space to contract from an asymptomatic versus again much higher risk associated with someone who is actively presenting symptoms."
It's not that masking will take the viral spread of even asymptomatic individuals down to zero, but it will reduce the amount that gets out and thus require longer exposure to get to a symptom onset point than otherwise would be the case.