The Superior Express -

Kansas City metro area health leaders are warning hospitals are overwhelmed as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen.

“Folks, this is what you have to understand: As the weather got cold, masks came off. We still have a lot of unvaccinated folks. We set ourselves up for danger,” said Steve Stites, chief medical officer at The University of Kansas Health System. ”That danger is real, it’s present and it’s at our doorstep. This is a warning to all of you: We

are in trouble.”

Stites and the KU health system hosted a Friday news conference featuring chief medical officers of hospitals in northeast Kansas and the Kansas City area. He likened the meeting to a “tornado warning to our community.”

“Our goal is to get you scared straight,” Stites said. ”Because right now, we’re not seeing it. We’re not seeing it in the public.”

The consensus is that the vast majority — approximately 90 percent — of hospitalized COVID-19 patients aren’t vaccinated. For the few who are vaccinated, they typically have not gotten a booster shot, tend to have other health conditions that put them at increased risk for severe illness and rarely need the ICU or a ventilator.

The hospital leaders say the current wave is already worse than the surge in late summer and early fall. It also threatens to be worse than last winter’s peak.

“Hospitals are full; there’s no place to go,” Stites said.

So far, hospitals have seen few reinfections, but omicron may change that.

“It’s going to be really, really different and reinfections are going to be very high,” said Raghavendra Adiga, chief medical officer at Liberty Hospital in Missouri.

Doctors continue to refer to COVID-19 as a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and Stites added that it is a “death march of the unvaccinated.” Only about 56 percent of the entire Kansas population is fully vaccinated, according to federal health data, and the counties with the worst case rates have lower vaccination rates.

Gov. Laura Kelly, who has not held a Statehouse news conference on the pandemic since July, told reporters after addressing her tax reform council Friday that her administration is “doing everything that we possibly can to mitigate the damage that the virus is doing.” She said free vaccine are available all across the state, she is encouraging people to mask up and “to implement the public health safety protocols that we know work.”

“The numbers would suggest that there’s a lot more work to do,” she said. “But we’re doing all that we can do. It really now is up to individuals to do what they can do to mitigate the spread of this virus.”