photo by: Contributed/LMH Health

A COVID-19 drive-thru testing site at Lawrence's hospital, LMH Health, is pictured Tuesday, April 7, 2020.

The local health department and Unified Command partners are asking Douglas County residents to complete a short survey so they can gauge the number of people with COVID-19 symptoms, Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health announced in a news release Friday.

The survey opened Friday and will be available until Monday at 5 p.m. It asks about one’s symptoms or lack thereof, as well as demographic and contact information. Those who participate will be asked to complete the survey several more times in the coming weeks so that results may be compared. Information provided in the survey will be confidential and will be used only by Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health to help determine the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community.

“We ask Douglas County residents to fill out the survey accurately and completely, to let us know whether they are currently experiencing symptoms or not. Completing the survey is voluntary, but we ask that as many people as possible participate to get a good picture of how the coronavirus is affecting the community,” said Sonia Jordan, director of informatics at Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.

The survey can be accessed on the health department’s website, ldchealth.org.

The number of Douglas County residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 is 42, the same number as Wednesday’s count, local health officials announced Friday.

Of those 42, 25 cases are believed to have been contracted through travel, eight from local transmission and eight from contact with someone with a positive case. One case is still under investigation for type of transmission.

Contact with a positive case means the health department has determined the person’s exposure to a known positive case was the source of his or her contracting COVID-19, whereas local transmission means the department’s investigators could not identify the source of the person’s disease and the person had not recently traveled to an area where COVID-19 was present.

The 42 local cases involve two people in their late teens, 18 people in their 20s, 10 people in their 30s, five people in their 40s, four people in their 50s, one person in his or her 60s, one person in his or her 70s and one person who is over the age of 80, according to Friday’s news release from the health department. Of those cases, 22 are men and 20 are women, the health department said.

Twenty-nine out of the 42 people with cases of COVID-19 have recovered.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced that, as of 11 a.m. Friday, a total of 1,705 Kansas residents had tested positive for COVID-19, including 84 deaths as a result of the disease.

KDHE’s online map noted that 1,091 Douglas County residents have been tested for the disease so far. The county’s testing rate per 1,000 people was 8.92, the eighth highest in the state.

The daily update from LMH Health announced that, as of 8:30 a.m. Friday, there was one patient at Lawrence’s hospital with COVID-19 and one other who was under investigation for the virus. LMH Health was using none of its ventilators on Friday, 13% of its critical care (ICU) beds and 21% of its hospital beds.

LMH Health had collected a total of 911 specimens for COVID-19 testing as of Friday, and 38 of those specimens had tested positive for the virus. On Thursday alone, LMH Health collected 15 specimens.