1) Kansas Health Department’s Hopeful-Looking COVID-19 Assessments Are Drastically Undercounting Cases – Smith found that Kansas’s health department was not including asymptomatic cases in its counts of COVID-19 cases. This made the state’s data appear that cases were declining when they were actually increasing.
2) Why Outbreaks At A Well Known Westport Bar And Other Spots Have Gone Unreported By Health Officials – Kansas City, Missouri’s health department claimed to be tracking outbreaks of COVID-19 in business, but through the exploring an outbreak that occurred a one local bar, Smith found that few smaller outbreaks were actually been tracked and reported by the city, a problem that health department officials then acknowledged.
3) Coronavirus Patients From Rural Communities Without Mask Orders Are Crowding Kansas City Hospitals – By fall of 2020, the Kansas City metro area had managed to “bend the curve” on COVID-19 cases through mask orders and restrictions on business. However, local hospitals were continuing to fill up in large part because of increasing numbers of critically ill patients coming from rural areas where masks orders and other restrictions hadn’t been implemented.
4) The Wolf Is At The Door: How Missouri’s Garbled Coronavirus Data Misled The Public Until It Was Too Late – While closely watching COVID-19 data in Missouri over the course of the pandemic, Smith discovered that the official data on COVID-19 and hospital capacity presented by the state health department and Gov. Mike Parson downplayed the severity of the virus and exaggerated the capacity of hospitals to treat patients.
5) These Families Raised Millions To Fund Treatment For Their Kids Genetic Disorders. It Hasn’t Happened – For years, families across the U.S. who have children with rare genetic disorders have raised millions to fund the work of one Texas researcher who claims to be on the verge of a breakthrough. So far, he has delivered little in the way of actual treatments, and ethicists question this practice of funding research.