By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
Two of the eight people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ellis County have been cleared by the Ellis County Health Department to end their quarantine, but the department continues to monitor the patients who still have active cases.
"We are still following up with them on a daily basis," Ellis County Health Services Director Jason Kennedy told Hays Post.
The department is also doing contact tracing to help mitigate the possibility of further cases and have been doing a daily update of cases around 5 p.m.
As more people recover from the virus, Kennedy said, they are able to resume daily activities without risk to others.
They "are no different than anybody else out there," he said.
"After people have recovered from the flu, we don't treat them any differently, where they are able to go back to what they were doing prior," Kennedy said. "This is the same kind of deal."
But with much still unknown about the virus, he said everyone should continue to follow the stay-at-home order and practice good social distancing.
"There are some things that we still don't know, but we have been into this thing since November," Kennedy said. "So we do have some fairly good idea of how this thing is going to interact, how it transmits among people. We do know some of the transmissibility data now. So we have some pretty good information about the virus."
With that information and with most people will only experience mild symptoms, he said conversations are shifting to how to protect high risk populations as plans to reopen businesses continue to be developed.
But moving past the pandemic will be in some way shaped by the availability of testing.
So far, Kennedy testing materials have kept up with demand.
"Really from the start of this, we have never turned people away in Ellis County for lack of testing material," he said. "We turned them away because they didn't have symptoms."
From the onset, he said, you had to met criteria set by the CDC and KDHE to be tested and you still need to be symptomatic for clinical testing.
There are four different types of testing, but right now the best one is the the quick swab test, Kennedy said. With that test, someone who is symptomatic will have a nose swab performed with the sample then sent to lab with results in 24 to 48 hours.
"The problem with using a test like that for opening up the economy is that test really only tells you 'today,'" he said.
To get a better view of how many people may have been exposed and have developed a potential, if temporary, immunity antibody testing is needed to do population studies.
"I'm hearing a big push for testing, but I'm not sure why," Kennedy. "I think that is the question that we need to get from the state level and the federal level, is why are we doing testing, why do we want this testing and what is our goal."
Knowing how many people have the virus today does not help the larger goal of reopening society, but a combination of other types of testing — including antibody testing that shows COVID-19 recovery even if previously undetected — may be used to reopen areas.
That helps to find of what level of exposure the whole community has had to the virus, rather than the individual and would be key to understanding herd immunity and the overall threat to at-risk populations.
While the department has shared information as required to the public about active cases in Ellis County, Kennedy said it is limited in what information can be released.
"We cautiously release information," he said.
HIPAA regulations regulate that no information can be released that can distinguish an individual.
That includes information that someone could reasonably use to track it back to an individual," Kennedy said.
He further said the community should not place blame on anyone who contracted the virus.
"This is not anyone's fault that they got this," Kennedy said. "We shouldn't allow others to ostracize or belittle or talk bad about people because of something that goes outside of their control."
And he said it goes beyond regulations.
"HIPAA doesn't allow us and, honestly, just being a good human being should not allow us to talk badly about others, because of something they can't control," Kennedy said.
He said anyone with contact with an individual will be contacted by the department and, if you have not been contacted, you are likely not at risk of contracting the virus from an individual who has an active case.
"What we can do is notify every single person that was impacted by this individual," Kennedy said. "We personally call and talk to every single person that was within 6 feet for greater than 10 minutes."
Any close contact of an individual while they are positive for COVID-19 will be contacted by the department, usually within 24 hours, Kennedy said.
They do that to "contain and isolate any type of spread," he said.
Kennedy said the best action right now is to maintain social distancing guidelines in place.
"Right now, we need everybody to continue to follow the governor's orders. We need you to protect yourself — wash your hands, not touch your eyes nose ears or mouth, and just eliminating that social contact. So, staying six feet away," Kennedy said.
So far, he said it appears measures in place are working.
"There is a light at the end of the tunnel," Kennedy said. "When we started this five weeks ago, all of these measures were to flatten the curve, so we didn't overwhelm our hospital system. The latest projections say as of the morning, if you look at healthdata.org, we show a surplus of almost 4,500 hospital beds in the state of Kansas."