Kansas Governor Laura Kelly is asking residents — again — to do what they can to stop coronavirus.
To that end, the governor held a news conference at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita on Wednesday, in part to announce the creation of the Safer Classrooms Workgroup — a group of healthcare professionals from across Kansas that will highlight the urgency of protecting kids from the COVID-19 delta variant and use best practices to support health and safety efforts at the local and state level. Kelly says the work group will compile a weekly report with several key data points for parents and school administrators.
In addition, the report will detail county-level data on vaccinations, cases, hospitalizations and deaths; and schools with active outbreaks.
The creation of the new workgroup comes with doctors across Kansas having increasing difficulties transferring patients, in part because of bed space shortages and in part because overworked nurses are taking jobs out of the healthcare sector.
The governor’s stop in Wichita followed a similar stop at St. Luke’s in Kansas City on Aug. 20. As was the case in late August, the governor stopped short of issuing a statewide mask mandate.
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