Course: Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in Kansas
CME Credits: 1.00
Released: 2021-06-23
This study examined the association between mask mandates in Kansas counties and COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. The Kansas executive order that took effect on July 3 was adopted by only 15 counties, and 68 counties did not have a mandate through October. A second mask mandate order took effect on November 25, and 40 additional counties adopted it.
For this case-control study, data for the daily number of cases and deaths per county were from the New York Times1 and hospitalizations by county of residence were collected from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment2 (eMethods and eReferences in the Supplement). We adjusted the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by each county’s 2019 population to obtain the rate per 100,000 and took a 7-day moving average of these variables. We refer to these population-adjusted rates as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for the remainder of this report. This study was deemed not human subjects research by the University of Kansas institutional review board and followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.
Educational Objective
To identify the key insights or developments described in this article
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