By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — A free-market policy group in Kansas is attempting to make publicly available statistics on hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 easier for Kansans to digest.
What we've tried to do is put things in perspective," said Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute. "There's charts here, for example, there's one showing the new weekly cases across the state of Kansas and it's certainly showing an uptick. At the same time that's going up, you see the mortality rate falling."
The Kansas Policy Institute's COVID-19 Information Center has information on:
1. Comparative trends – cases, hospitalizations, and deaths
2. Cases, deaths, mortality rate and infection rate by county
3. Cases and deaths in Kansas nursing homes and other clusters
4. Hospitalization and death rate trends in Kansas
5. Hospital beds available in Kansas and regional states
6. Cases and deaths by state
7. Pneumonia, COVID, and flu deaths
8. COVID economic impact
"On July 6, there were almost 17,000 cases and a little over 1200 people hospitalized, so it was a cumulative rate of 7.31%," Trabert said. "That's down to 5.37%. This is cumulative. What's happened in between there that's brought that down? Only about 4% of the cases that have developed required hospitalization."
This is consistent with the hypothesis of Hutchinson Regional Medical Center pulmonologist Dr. Mohammed Al-Halawani earlier this month that it appears that COVID-19 is more infectious now than it was earlier in the year, but less severe, particularly for those without underlying comorbidities.