Sedgwick County commissioners are pushing for more COVID-19 testing in the Wichita area as businesses reopen during the coronavirus pandemic, citing concerns that testing should be available to people as they return to work. The commission approved spending $250,000 for mobile COVID-19 testing Wednesday. That roving site will be available only to people who have coronavirus symptoms, the same as the health department’s testing site st 2716 W. Central in west Wichita. Commissioner David Dennis said it’s unfair for the county to expect businesses to open back up without employers knowing whether workers are carriers of the virus.
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Officials at one of the hardest-hit rural hospitals in Kansas during the COVID-19 pandemic have started to catch their breath after hitting a peak of cases earlier in the month. Southwest Medical Center in Seward County had prepared for as many as 22 patients. It hit that number between May 3-4, necessitating a Blackhawk helicopter to deliver an emergency shipment of ventilators to the hospital. The number of cases was the maximum the hospital had resources to treat and was a couple more cases than the much larger Ascension Via Christi in Wichita saw at its peak in the middle of April. Besides a significant cluster of cases at a meatpacking facility in its own town of Liberal, the hospital also took patients from a cluster at a meatpacking operation 45 minutes away in Oklahoma. The 101-bed facility also had COVID-19 patients from Texas, according to Robin Allaman, Southwest’s vice president of patient care services.
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Kansas will take the next step in its reopening on Friday, when movie theaters, museums, non-tribal casinos and other indoor entertainment venues will be permitted to reopen. Bars and night clubs, along with swimming pools, will stay closed. Gov. Laura Kelly unveiled the changes Tuesday — the latest rollback of restrictions after weeks of lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
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