Over the Hump?

Can it be true? Did the COVID Dumpster Fire Rating get downgraded to two masks instead of three? YES. Don’t be an idiot, of course, and keep in mind that there’s still plenty of active spread in the community (and winter is coming), but for the moment it seems that we may have peaked and started to come back down a bit.

This trend is validated in multiple places:

• The Johnson County COVID Dashboard has been showing a plateau now for several weeks, and hospitalizations are trending downward.
• Johnson County public schools are showing declining case and quarantine numbers across all six school districts.
• The Mid-America Regional Council (Kansas City metro-wide) shows similar declines in neighboring metro counties, in both cases and hospitalization rates.

We’re not “done with the pandemic” of course, as we still have post-Labor Day (and post-NFL kickoff, and post-Halloween, and post-Thanksgiving, and…) to deal with in the coming weeks. But with pediatric vaccinations potentially becoming available sometime in the next 6 or 7 weeks it may actually be possible to breathe a collective sigh of relief by Christmas.

Back home in Johnson County schools, though, we still have some hotspots and annoyances. Spring Hill has this annoying habit of retroactively updating their numbers, which is what happened last night. What used to say single-digit COVID cases now says 53…so when you’re looking at the charts, take Spring Hill’s data with a grain of salt.

In Blue Valley School District, we’re still seeing an annoying trend of the majority of cases being reported at elementary school buildings.I won’t speculate about why — plenty of other folks will take care of that for me, I’m sure — but three of the top 4 case numbers came from elementary schools. (I’m looking. at you, Harmony and Wolf Springs and Stanley).

And, if you listen to the new podcast episode, you’ll hear about the other annoying data point: case rates are higher in schools than they are in the broader community, and that seems to be happening at the elementary school level at districts all over the country.