KANSAS CITY, Mo. — State-licensed adult care facilities in Kansas have new COVID-19 testing standards in place after Gov. Laura Kelly signed an executive order mandating the action Wednesday.
Executive Order 20-69 brings testing at 473 state-licensed adult care homes up to par with what’s already happening in federally licensed facilities in the state.
The order requires staff and residents with symptoms to be tested; testing in response to an outbreak; and sets standards for frequency of staff testing based on the county’s positivity rate.
If the facility is in a county with a positivity rate less than 5%, staff members only need to be tested once per month.
If the positivity rate is between 5% and 10%, that’s bumped up to once per week.
Staff members will be tested twice per week if the facility they work at is in a county with a positivity rate higher than 10%.
Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services Secretary Laura Howard said some of the measures were already happening at the state’s facilities, but that the standardization provided by the order is a “common sense measure to bring uniformity.”
Howard said these standards are already met at 360 federally-licensed nursing facilities in Kansas, and that increased testing capacity in the state allowed officials to expand them to state-licensed locations.
“By implementing uniform testing guidelines for nursing facilities statewide, we create clarity on the testing practices that will protect adult care home workers, residents and communities from the spread of COVID-19,” Kelly said in a news release.
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