MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — Another Kansas school district is reinstating masking requirements to combat COVID-19 outbreaks and vaccination efforts are increasing as younger patients and staffing shortages strain the state’s hospitals.
The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Kansas has risen over the past two weeks from 667.57 new cases per day on July 27 to 1,683.57 new cases per day on Tuesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
That has led to three active clusters at schools and four active sports outbreaks, according to state health officials.
The Manhattan-Ogden USD 383 Board of Education voted 6-1 at a special meeting Wednesday night to confirm the district’s updated Pandemic Response Plan. The face mask requirement is regardless of vaccination status.
“I do not want to have to close buildings due to them being understaffed or because we have lots of sick children,” said board vice president Kristin Brighton.
Douglas County leaders also expressed interest Wednesday in potential mask requirements for children who are not yet eligible for vaccination, noting that not all school districts in the county were requiring masks, the Lawrence Journal-World reports.
The rise in cases is straining hospital, which are treating younger patients. Hutchinson Regional Medical Center vice president Chuck Welch said the average age of the 55 COVID-19 patients it has treated since June is 48, compared to 65 last year, The Hutchinson News reported. One patient was just 2 weeks old, Welch told the Reno County Commission.
“We’re seeing it again,” he said. “We’re getting reached out to from Arkansas and Nebraska asking ‘can you take a patient?’ Our response to those folks has primarily been ‘as of yet, we’re not accepting those patients.’”
The reason, Welch said, is that the hospital’s daily census is already up, even without a lot of COVID-19 cases, while skilled nursing staff levels are down about 30%.
According to the Kansas Hospital Association, 13 of Kansas’ 125 hospitals statewide are anticipating “critical” staffing shortages within the next week. Even before the pandemic, nurses were in short supply, with turnover usually higher than 10% and vacancies around 5%, The Kansas City Star reports.
But in 2020, hospitals have seen staff burn out, retire or leave for higher-paying jobs.
Turnover among Kansas RN’s more than doubled from 7% in 2019 to 16% in 2020. At the end of the year, hospitals reported that 9% of RN positions were vacant.
Cindy Samuelson, a spokeswoman for KHA, said staffing has been the number one complaint among hospitals for weeks.
“It continues to be really stressful and challenging for the people that are left to care for patients,” she said.
In south-central Kansas, Medicine Lodge Memorial Hospital has sent patients to hospitals in Denver because closer facilities are full, said CEO Ashley Taylor.
And she said the nursing staff is tired. Six nurses, about a third of their staff, have left in the past year. Many who were close to retirement left early because of the pandemic. The staff that remains, she said, has become less willing to pick up extra shifts then they were last year.
“It’s so hard to bounce back from the mental and physical exhaustion and get your head back in the game” Taylor said.
Meanwhile, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment is taking aim at the rising cases by partnering with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas and the Kansas Turnpike Authority to offer free COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinics at three Kansas Turnpike service areas.
“Receiving the vaccine continues to be the best way to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus,” said Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of KDHE, in a news release.