Kansas City's health department will now show you its disease counts every Wednesday
A new public dashboard posts reported case counts for every condition doctors, labs and hospitals must report to the city, by category, back to January 2024, refreshed weekly. The first thing it shows: intestinal illness in Kansas City this summer ran more than three and a half times last summer's count. Here is how to read it without scaring yourself.
On Tuesday, August 11, this paper’s columnist wrote that a Kansas City reader could not get a local count of the summer’s cyclospora outbreak from any agency that held one. The state published a single statewide number, and the metro figures that did surface existed only because a television station had asked. “It should not require asking,” the column ended.
Seventeen days later, on Friday, August 28, the Kansas City Health Department turned on a public dashboard that answers a version of that request every week, whether anyone asks or not.
What it is
The KCHD Communicable Disease Dashboard is a Power BI report linked from the department’s data page. It shows reported case counts (the number of reports the department received, rather than the number of people who were sick) for every disease and condition that Kansas City’s own ordinance requires clinics, laboratories and hospitals to report to the city. The department says it will refresh the board every Wednesday with the previous Sunday-through-Saturday week, and that counts for a week can change afterward “as reports are updated and investigations are completed.”
That is the city’s description. Here is what the tool actually does when you open it, as of Saturday morning:
- It covers January 1, 2024 through August 22, 2026. The week of August 23–29 will land with the first Wednesday refresh, September 2.
- It opens on the last twelve calendar weeks, May 31 through August 22, and compares them to the same twelve weeks of 2025. You can change the window (days, weeks, months, years) and switch the comparison to the period immediately before instead of last year.
- It groups conditions into twelve categories, each of which expands to the individual diseases underneath it. We are reporting the category totals; the condition-level rows require a click we have not yet made.
- It is citywide. On the summary page there is no neighborhood, ZIP code, age, race or sex breakdown, and no count of hospitalizations or deaths. If those exist anywhere in the tool, they are not on the page a resident lands on.
- It flags increases, not decreases. A small arrow marks a category up 1–24 percent over the comparison period; a bigger arrow marks 25 percent or more. Drops get no arrow at all.
What it showed on day one
The default view, summer 2026 against summer 2025, by category (this period / same period last year):
| Category | May 31–Aug 22, 2026 | May 31–Aug 22, 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sexually transmitted infections | 1,645 | 1,549 | +6.2% |
| Enteric | 382 | 105 | +263.8% |
| Vaccine preventables | 198 | 640 | −69.1% |
| Respiratory diseases | 182 | 619 | −70.6% |
| Zoonotic | 169 | 118 | +43.2% |
| Animal bites | 165 | 116 | +42.2% |
| Environmental | 78 | 73 | +6.8% |
| Viral hepatitis | 50 | 76 | −34.2% |
| Mycobacterial | 13 | 123 | −89.4% |
| Vector borne diseases | 13 | 19 | −31.6% |
| Systemic | 11 | 51 | −78.4% |
| Viral infections of the skin | 2 | 3 | −33.3% |
Two categories moved sharply, and only one of them is a story.
Enteric (intestinal illness, the category a parasite like cyclospora lands in) ran 382 reports this summer against 105 last summer. That is the outbreak this paper has been writing about since July, now visible as a local number on a city page for the first time. It is not the same figure the department gave a TV station on August 11 (244, attributed that night both to Jackson County and to the city), and it should not be: this is a twelve-week category total covering every reportable gut infection, on the city’s own report dates. The two numbers measure different things. What the dashboard adds is a number you can re-check next Wednesday without calling anyone.
The big drops are the other one, and they are not a story yet: respiratory down 71 percent, vaccine-preventable diseases down 69 percent, mycobacterial (the tuberculosis family) down 89 percent. Summer 2025 may have had a wave that summer 2026 did not; a reporting practice may have changed; a lab may have switched what it sends. The dashboard shows the number, not the reason, and a number this size with no explanation attached is a question for the department before it is a headline. The department gives an address for exactly that (health.stats@kcmo.org); we will put the question there and print the answer when it comes.
How to read it (a short course in not panicking)
A dashboard of reported cases is a dashboard of paperwork. A jump can mean more disease, or more testing, or a laboratory catching up on a backlog. Three rules:
- Watch the trend, not the week. One high Wednesday is noise. Four in a row is a signal.
- Expect last week to grow. The city says so itself: counts change as late reports arrive and investigations close. A number that moved is the system working.
- “Reportable” is a legal category, not a danger ranking. Chlamydia will dominate the sexually-transmitted-infections row every single week of every year. That is not news; it is the shape of the list.
One caution the dashboard does not print for you: its comparison is only as good as the year you compare to. “Same period last year” is a fair baseline for an ordinary summer and a misleading one for a summer that had its own outbreak, which is exactly what the tuberculosis and respiratory rows may be telling you about 2025.
Who built it
The department credits its Office of Population Health Science and its Division of Communicable Disease and Prevention; no outside vendor and no cost figure appear in the announcement. Dr. Alex Francisco, the department’s chief science officer, put the purpose plainly: “By sharing reported case counts in a public, consistent format, we are helping residents see the same information we use to monitor communicable disease activity in Kansas City.” Health Director Dr. Marvia Jones: “At a time like this, residents want to know the status of their community’s health.”
What’s next: the first Wednesday refresh is September 2, when the week of August 23–29 posts. The Stare will pull the twelve category totals every Wednesday and note when one moves outside its recent range, the same discipline we apply to police clearance numbers. Wyandotte and Johnson counties run their own health departments and their own systems, so a metro-wide picture is still three windows; this is the first of the three that updates on a schedule you can set a clock by.