KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After temporarily halting the release of information on COVID-19 clusters in the state last week, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Wednesday reversed course again.
At a weekly press briefing, KDHE Secretary Dr. Lee Norman announced that the state would once again begin releasing the list of clusters.
"We got feedback, a lot of positive and some negative feedback, about our methodology before," Norman said.
Listing the clusters is meant to make tracking cases more efficient and accurate than previous methods.
Under previous methods, a location was considered to be active until it had gone 28 days without a new case.
"As an example, a location might have had 30 or 50 or 75 cases back in March and April but still be considered active because they have a handful of cases trickling and hadn't gone a full 28 days without a single case," Norman said.
The list of clusters will only include cases from the past 14 days and will not include a cumulative count of cases from the locations, which it previously had when the department first began releasing clusters.
Once a location no longer has five or more cases within the past 14 days, it will be released from the cluster list.
According to Norman, the data from the past 14 days is the most relevant and most important information that people need.
Norman said the department chose to release the list of clusters to be transparent with residents on the exact locations of COVID-19 clusters. It also allows people to be proactive about the decisions they make when going to these locations, Norman said.
The list will be posted on the KDHE website every Wednesday.
