KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In the absence of widespread COVID-19 testing, the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department is asking residents to complete a survey that will help officials determine the status of the virus and testing access in the city.
“It's a survey that we're doing because we know that testing has been not available to everybody," said Elizabeth Walsh Yoder, a public health statistician with the KCMO Health Department.
The department wants to know if there are specific pockets of the city that have had difficulty getting access to testing.
Walsh Yoder said the data will not be used to inflate case numbers but rather pinpoint pockets of need throughout the city where increased testing could be best utilized.
"Some people aren't able to get tested at the beginning right? It was because they weren't sick enough or they didn't have those three key symptoms of COVID-19, which is the fever, the coughing and the shortness of breath,” Walsh Yoder said, “or that it wouldn't change how their medical treatment was. So we are just trying to get an understanding of why people who weren't able to get tested, why that might have been."
Walsh Yoder said the health department has “the community’s best interest at heart.”
The survey will close at 11:59 p.m. on April 23, but staff with the KCMO Health Department said the survey will occur monthly to continuously gauge whether control measures are working as stay-at-home orders are in talks of either being loosened or extended.
To complete the survey, click here.
