KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The COVID-19 pandemic started two years ago, but Missouri and Kansas endured the highest infection rate for any month during the outbreak last month — and it’s not particularly close.
With the arrival of the highly transmissible omicron variant and with the delta variant still circulating, nearly 27% of all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Kansas and more than 22% of cases in Missouri were recorded in January 2022 alone.
For the seven-county Kansas City area — Johnson, Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties in Kansas and Cass, Clay, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri — more than 26% of all cases during the entire pandemic were confirmed last month.
The new data, which was compiled via state and county health department reports, is staggering.
Prior to recording 197,287 new COVID-19 infections last month, there had never been more than 72,579 cases reported in Kansas in any single month (November 2020).
It’s a similar story in Missouri, where the 258,943 new cases in January more than doubled the previous record for a single month (123,756 in November 2020).
There have now been nearly 1.2 million cases in Missouri, meaning roughly one in five residents have been infected during the pandemic.
There have been nearly 735,000 cases in Kansas, roughly one case for every four residents.
RELATED | COVID-19 case tracker: Where we stand in MO, KS, nationwide
Numbers for the Kansas City region also dwarfed all previous records with 111,465 last month, which topped the previous record set only a month earlier to close out 2021 (42,206).
The percentage of COVID-19 patients who are dying has declined with omicron’s arrival, but the death toll in Kansas (498), Missouri (1,293) and the Kansas City region (508) remained high because the numbers of cases shot up so dramatically.
Kansas City topped 500 deaths in a month for the first time during the pandemic.
Missouri continues to report more than 5,000 new cases and five deaths each day with the PCR positivity rate for the last seven days north of 28%, according to the latest data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Meanwhile, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — who has no medical training or background, but has entered the Republican primary to replace Sen. Roy Blunt — has launched a campaign of lawsuits against school districts with the temerity to put infection-control measures in place
The Missouri state health department also lists probable cases and deaths, which would add 259,819 cases and 3,243 deaths to already soaring totals.
—
We want to hear from you on what resources Kansas City families might benefit from to help us all through the pandemic. If you have five minutes, feel free to fill out this survey to help guide our coverage: KSHB COVID Survey.
