Give thanks, not COVID.
That’s the mantra Lyon County Public Health is using with Thanksgiving almost at hand. Here’s Lyon County Public Health Emergency Preparedness Director Jennifer Millbern:
That advice, however, comes with coronavirus cases in the middle of a hard spike that isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
Lyon County has had an increase of over 800 total cases and a jump of over 600 active cases since Oct. 26. The county is now 13th on the list of coronavirus cases per county in Kansas. It had been down to 15th on the list in mid-October and as high as eighth early in the pandemic. Lyon County is 17th in population across Kansas.
Lyon County Public Health’s information released to the public no longer includes cluster categories or data, but the agency says there are several recent outbreaks tied to bars, parties and large gatherings. To put that in further perspective, Public Health and other area public health departments are also directing people to an event risk assessment tool created by Georgia Tech. The online database lets people choose the event size and so-called “ascertainment bias,” or estimated ratio of unreported COVID cases to reported cases. It also lets people see global risk estimates, real-time national and state estimates and continuous risk estimates at the national level. Based on an event size of 10 and an ascertainment bias of five unreported cases per reported case, Lyon County now has a 56-percent chance of at least one coronavirus patient at that activity. A gathering of 50 people with the same ascertainment bias pushes that risk to 98 percent in Lyon County.
