This Coronavirus Pandemic and the Tough State Of and For Kansas

There's a pretty comprehensive article in today's New York Times, covering the overall situations across the nation with this pandemic, no surprise.

Testing Remains Scarce as Governors Weigh Reopening States

In both red and blue states, governors, health departments and hospitals are finding innovative ways to cope, but still lack what experts say they need to track and contain outbreaks.

Interestingly, tellingly and helpfully if probably also unfortunately, they have an entire section of it dedicated to the State of Kansas.

Credit...John Hanna/Associated Press

“We are nowhere near where we need to be with testing supplies,” Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas said.

Herewith the segment of the article, with some occasional commentary. Also, occasional bolding of type within the article for emphasis.

Kansas: ‘There Will Be Death.’

After getting 2,000 tests kits to southwest Kansas and assessing the scale of the outbreak there, Ms. Kelly decided it was not necessary to close the meatpacking plants.

But she said the tortuous path to freeing up even minimal supplies for testing remains the biggest reason she was reluctant to lift the stay-at-home order she imposed on March 28.

“We are nowhere near where we need to be with testing supplies,” she said on Thursday. “I’m looking down a lot of rabbit holes trying to figure out how we are going to get those test kits here. It’s imperative if we are going to be able to lift that stay-at-home order.”

Kansas has one of the lowest Covid-19 testing rates in the nation. Dr. Lee A. Norman, the state’s top health official, estimated that Kansas needed tens of thousands more testing kits.

The state is so short of plastic test swabs that he has appealed to dentists to manufacture them in their offices by modifying 3-D printers used to make dental models.

Since March 20, Kansas has sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency nine requests for medical supplies, including for 235,000 testing swabs, 60,000 kits to transport samples and 178,200 kits to analyze them. As of Wednesday, the agency had sent “nothing,” said Jonathan York, the state’s coordinating officer. Federal officials told him that other states were in more desperate shape.

In mid-April, the federal government delivered 273,000 surgical masks, the kind needed to protect medical workers who administer tests. But Dr. Norman said the masks, which had been privately donated, “were so substandard they wouldn’t even make a good coffee filter.”

Late Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has helped the state obtain some supplies, told officials it intended to ship at least 25,000 of the 80,000 test kits it had requested.

State officials have had no luck trying to buy supplies themselves. Dr. Norman said Kansas had standing requests with private suppliers for $43 million in equipment, a “staggering” sum equivalent to nearly a third of his department’s annual public health budget.

“But the pipelines have pretty much dried up,” he said.

Kansas is still dealing with the hangover of seven years of draconian budget cuts under former Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican. Ms. Kelly said the state health department “had been pretty much decimated” by the time she became governor in 2018, with the laboratory that now processes many Covid-19 tests resembling “something out of the past...”

Thanks, Governor Brownback! Thanks, Republicans!

...The state plans to rely heavily on volunteers to create a corps of 400 workers to monitor the contacts of people who test positive.

Although the state is far from meeting the broad guidelines for testing capacity the White House has recommended for reopening, Ms. Kelly is under growing pressure to allow her stay-at-home order to expire as scheduled on May 3. The Republican-controlled state legislature has moved to curb her emergency powers, and protesters gathered on Thursday on the statehouse grounds.

“What is an acceptable level of risk?” Dr. Norman asked. “We cannot get it down to zero, so how can we guarantee that people won’t get sick?”

So there you have it, campers. Not a good or pretty situation over there next door in Kansas regarding this pandemic. At least Governor Kelly had the good sense to shut the state down early and pretty completely with her stay at home order. Now if she and they could just get some tests from Washington.

You know, the tests this Republican Party President Trump says are so plentiful.

Meanwhile, this from Trump's own lead on the pandemic.

Dr. Fauci says the US needs to double coronavirus testing before the economy reopens

Heavens help Kansas.

Help us all.