Ford County now has 84 COVID-19 cases according to KDHE; County claims KDHE numbers don’t always match

DODGE CITY, Kan. (KSNW) – The Ford County Health Department said the county has 16 new cases of coronavirus as of Friday.

According to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the county now has 84 total cases. The highest in southwest Kansas.

Ford County released this statement:

“The increase in cases the last few days is attributed to the health department investigation team identifying close contacts of already confirmed positive cases. We do not have evidence of community spread even though we have seen a lot of new cases recently. We have been able to identify the main sources of spread, have been in contact with them and their close contacts, ordered multiple tests and issued quarantines. Since we are identifying more contacts, we are testing more people and that will increase the amount of positive cases. Each positive case has been cooperative, following all quarantine orders and the early cases are recovering at home. If, at any time, we feel that a source of spread is a “public place,” we will work with that agency/business/entity to provide information to the public. Other counties are announcing which “public places” are sources of spread because their cases are different than ours – we don’t have any “public places” that are sources of spread. We have been able to specifically identify the original positive cases and who they were in contact with and all of those individuals have been identified, evaluated, tested and quarantined if necessary. One major note is that many individuals were not practicing social distancing and/or observing the stay-at-home order and that has contributed to more exposures to close contacts resulting in more positive cases.
Also, there are questions about the total number of cases vs. the numbers that KDHE provides in their reports. The county is reporting all positive / presumptive positive cases. KDHE is responsible for reporting on all 105 counties in Kansas so their staff cannot always add cases to the system the same time we do, so our numbers will not always match. That has to do with timing between each local health department and KDHE. This is the main reason why we are not reporting a “running total” of cases because our reports may not always match KDHE’s reports on a daily basis. So, we provide only the facts that we have in front of us at the time of each report. Even if KDHE’s numbers differ from ours, we are still investigating every single case we have in front of us.

-J.D. Gilbert, B.S., M.B.A.

The Ford County Health Department encourages everyone to continue practicing proper and efficient hand washing, staying-at-home and social distancing when having to shop for groceries and/or go to work.

The Ford County Geographic Information system (GIS) team developed the following resource to a reliable source of comprehensive factual information relating to COVID-19.