WICHITA, Kansas — Flatten the curve: A phrase that didn’t mean anything two months ago is now the driving factor behind social distancing, stay-at-home orders and limiting the number of people who can gather in one place.
The idea is to make sure hospitals aren’t overrun with severe COVID-19 cases, as well as help hospitals conserve limited resources such as personal protective equipment.
But in Kansas, there isn’t publicly available data on whether a hospital is close to filling up. And few are willing to share that information.
At this point, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said 327 people have been hospitalized with COVID-19, but it doesn’t provide which hospitals or whether patients have gone home.
Stormont Vail in Topeka is a rare exception. Every day, the hospital publishes a dashboard with information like how many patients it’s treating for COVID-19, ventilator usage and tests administered. While it strays from giving specific numbers of available beds, it does provide a percentage of how many of its hospital and intensive care beds are in use.
“It displaces rumor,” Stormont Vail CEO Dr. Rob Kenagy said of releasing the information. “It displaces fear.”
He said early on there were a lot of questions from the community and staff about whether the hospital would be the next Italy, Spain or New York City in terms of being overwhelmed. In their crisis plan, he said, transparency seemed like the best option.
The hospital is also providing a daily color-coded indicator of where they stand with personal protective equipment; green for good, yellow for getting low and red for critical need.
“If we were to get into a place where our capacity would be tested, we felt like it would be best for our community and our team members to know the detail of those capacity constraints,” Kenagy said.
Lawrence Memorial Hospital sends out a similar daily dashboard.
The University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, Kansas, isn’t going quite that far. But it has provided a daily total of how many COVID-19 cases it’s treating — hovering at about 30 for a few days.
“That’s really what’s telling us where we are on the curve because we haven’t tested enough people out in the community,” said Dr. Steve Stites, the chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System. “We don’t have the same public health structure we once did. We don’t have the same testing we once had.”
In a news conference Tuesday, he said stagnant hospitalization numbers likely mean that the Kansas City area is flattening the curve.
Meanwhile, most other hospitals are keeping mum. Salina Regional Health Center, Saint Catherine Hospital in Garden City and the St. Luke’s Hospital system declined to provide capacity information. Ascension Via Christi in Wichita and HCA hospitals in the Kansas City metro did not respond to a request for data.
Some might not be used to giving out the information, others may be worried about competitors knowing any weaknesses. Either way, the information exists. It’s just not public.
