Atchison, Doniphan, Sedgwick and Shawnee counties issue stay-at-home orders bringing to 1.6 million the number of Kansans covered by similar edicts; infection total hits 98; U.S. Rep. Marshall pressing for federal aid to struggling rural hospitals; KDHE denounces spread of bizarre health claims

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TOPEKA — Public health officials in Doniphan, Sedgwick, Atchison and Shawnee counties issued stay-in-place orders Tuesday to expand to about half the Kansan population restrictions on movement intended to constrain the spread of coronavirus.

Gov. Laura Kelly said she expected more counties would be added to a list that originally featured Johnson, Wyandotte, Leavenworth and Douglas counties. As of Tuesday, those four counties required residents to remain at home except to perform fundamental tasks, including health care, grocery shopping and securing fuel. The orders contained exclusions for essential occupations.

The Sedgwick and Atchinson county orders were to be effective at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, while Doniphan County decided the restriction would be initiated at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. Shawnee County at 5 p.m. Tuesday announced a safer-at-home order that will go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. In all, the eight-county region covers more than 1.6 million people.

"While none of us wanted to see these orders go into effect, they are necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus within these communities," Kelly said.

The Democratic governor said she would not, at this time, trigger a statewide stay-at-home directive resembling those adopted in about 20 states. She said a majority of the 105 counties in Kansas hadn’t reported a positive test for COVID-19.

"A statewide stay-at-home order may indeed become unavoidable in the coming days," Kelly said. "While disruptive and unpleasant, all of the orders I have issued to date are absolutely necessary to keep Kansans safe and healthy and to prevent overwhelming our emergency rooms and our larger health care system."

The governor also signed Tuesday an executive order outlining a framework to guide county health officials who issue stay-at-home orders. The idea is to bring consistency to restraints on people, she said.

At least 98 people in Kansas have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and two have died. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment said the positives ranged in age from 7 to 90 years old with a median age of 52. So far, the infection has been detected in 57 males and 41 females. KDHE is reporting 2,086 negative tests.

KDHE computer modeling projected the cases of infection in Kansas could rise to 300 to 900 by the end of March, Kelly said.

Tenant turmoil

Some residents of Cedar Ridge Apartments in Topeka were bothered by the management notice they received last week.

The fliers informed residents that Gov. Laura Kelly's executive order banning evictions in response to economic turmoil caused by COVID-19 doesn't apply to landlords, and leases would be enforced.

"We just don't want to leave residents with the impression they don't have to pay rent," said Linda Jones-Giltner, the property manager who signed and distributed notices at the direction of her corporate office. "We understand if they can't pay rent at this time, but the way the governor first announced her message, it made it kind of sound like people don't have to pay rent. We just want to make them aware that they're still obligated to pay their rent."

Attorneys for the Kansas City, Kan.-based Peterson Companies, which owns apartment complexes in four states, concluded the governor's order applied only to financial institutions. Kelly has replaced the order with new language, effective Tuesday, to make clear that landlords are prohibited from throwing people out on the street if their failure to pay rent is related to the pandemic.

Kelly's office announced the revised language Monday, along with other measures designed to ease transition to the new reality wrought by a rapidly spreading disease.

Other new orders from Kelly extend the deadline for paying state taxes to July 15, add 60 days to the renewal window for expiring driver's licenses, and block trash collectors from ending services for lack of pay. The governor also issued an order limiting the size of gatherings to 10 people.

Jones-Giltner, a board member for the Apartment Council of Topeka, said property managers are concerned about tenants who are out of work and college students who are returning home now that instruction has moved online.

The notice given to Cedar Ridge residents said companies that grant financing for the apartment complex haven’t granted waivers or extensions based on the coronavirus, but residents had approached management about paying April rent.

"We do not read anything in the governor’s order which suspends the accrual of rent," the notice said, and "our lenders require us to evict residents that are not paying." Management will enforce leases "at the earliest point allowed by law."

The notice, Jones-Giltner said, was simply a reminder that sooner or later residents will have to pay the money they owe. The complex isn't about to evict people, she said.

"We can't, and we know we can't," Jones-Giltner said. "We're just letting them know we're still here, we're still providing housing, and we're still in a contract."

Rural hospitals at risk

U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall, who serves the largely rural 1st District in Kansas, said he was concerned the outbreak would further jeopardize operations at the 84% of the state’s 107 rural hospitals considered at financial risk.

He said Congress should pass emergency relief legislation to help sustain hospitals and health care providers in rural areas. He said cancellation of office visits with doctors and suspended elective surgeries would starve them of revenue.

"The COVID-19 outbreak will further accelerate the closure of rural hospitals and threaten the stability of our health care provider groups if we don’t extend financial relief now," said Marshall, who is a physician from Great Bend.

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said the federal economic stimulus package being negotiated in Washington, D.C., had to concentrate resources on the capacity of the state health systems to handle an influx of coronavirus-infected patients and must deliver direct financial aid to individuals and businesses undercut by the pandemic.

"You can't expect small businesses and individuals to bear the brunt, the burden of a global pandemic," he said. "I would want to make sure this money is going to be used specifically to deal with COVID-19, not just bailing out a state that has a financial problem."

He said the legislation would provide direct $1,200 checks to individuals, $350 billion in loans to small businesses that could be forgiven if workers remain on payrolls, a 13-week escalation of unemployment benefits and a 90-day delay in repayment of college loans. It also would provide billions of dollars to the U.S. health system, in part, to spur more testing of people.

Education appeal

Meanwhile, the president of the Kansas Association of School Boards asked the Kansas congressional delegation to also consider broadband and food delivery challenges of public school districts that must shift to mostly online instruction for the remainder of the current school year.

The governor of Kansas closed all school buildings in an attempt to slow spread of the virus, but alternative education methods are to be introduced as early as March 30.

Shannon Kimball, president of the organization that works on behalf of about 500,000 students in Kansas, said Kansas school districts were offering curbside access to lunches and next-day breakfasts.

"We are proud of how our employees are meeting this obligation to our students, but school districts will need additional financial assistance in the form of increased reimbursement rates for school meals as the economic effects of the pandemic worsen," she said.

She said lack of broadband internet service in Kansas would inhibit online instruction, especially for rural and low-income students. She urged the Kansas delegation to press for funding of mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, computers, servers and software to support distance learning on a big scale.

’Bad information’

Physician Lee Norman, secretary of the state Department of Health and Environment, said the volume of information on social media about the coronavirus not grounded in science made the job of conveying health advisories to the public more a challenge. It isn’t just virus skeptics who do harm, he said. There is a problem with folks who believe the planet is in the grips of a great apocalypse, he said.

"There is so much bad information," Norman said. "It’s everything you hear from one extreme — ’It’s just nothing. It’s just a media scare. It’s a hoax.’ — all the way to the other side, 'It’s a tsunami that’s going to wash us all away.’ "

He said websites operated by KDHE, the University of Kansas Hospital System and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were solid resources during the pandemic.

The World Health Organization has been compelled to confront the influx of pseudoscience by posting to its website information debunking myths about COVID-19. No, the WHO insisted in its myth busters section, there was no scientific justification for spraying the body with chlorine, taking hot baths or eating garlic.

In Lawrence, chiropractor Amelia Rodrock urged potential customers to improve their chance of surviving COVID-19 by coming into her office at Rodrock Chiropractic. The Lawrence Journal-World reported Rodrock posted to Facebook on March 13 that people ought to "see a chiropractor to increase your chances of survival from coronavirus."

Norman, who worked as a chief medical officer for more than a quarter-century in Kansas and Washington and deployed in 2018 to the Middle East as senior medical officer for more than 12,000 U.S. soldiers, said chiropractor visits wouldn’t be a factor in quelling the virus.

"There is no evidence that that would work," said Norman, who believes common sense must prevail until development of vaccines and medication. "We have to rely on public health principles that are hundreds of years old."

Check back for updates as this story develops.