Kansas City has been named as a possible coronavirus hotspot in an unreleased White House report, obtained by NBC News.
The report, dated May 7, maps new cases across the country and finds that the Midwest is in danger of major outbreaks. It was prepared for the White House’s pandemic task force which is tracking rates of infection.
The report found massive surges in places like Nashville, Des Moines and Amarillo, Texas. Kansas City was named on the second tier of potential hotspots, along with cities like Minneapolis and Omaha.
“The spiking infection rates suggest that the pandemic is spreading quickly outside major coastal population centers that were early hot spots, while governors of some of the states that are home to new hot spots are following Trump’s advice to relax stay-at-home restrictions,” wrote NBC News.
The data shows that Kansas City’s “rate of new cases… represented an increase of more than 200 percent” over the past week. There have been seven hundred COVID-19 deaths across Kansas and Missouri.
