photo by: Contributed/LMH Health

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

About 1% of the Douglas County residents who responded to the health department’s COVID-19 survey reported experiencing COVID-19 symptoms within the last two weeks.

114 residents out of the 11,405 who responded to the survey reported symptoms including fever, a persistent cough and shortness of breath, according to a Thursday news release from Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health. Despite these results, there are only 44 Douglas County residents who had tested positive for the virus as of Thursday at 3 p.m., local health officials announced — the same as Wednesday’s count.

Testing capabilities have been severely limited in the state, as the Journal-World has reported. On Tuesday, however, Kansas state health officials expanded the criteria to qualify for a COVID-19 test.

“If some people are thinking we don’t have very many positive cases and the numbers right now aren’t going up very high or very quickly, according to this survey data, we would say at the moment, we are not symptom-free, so it’s important to keep following the stay-home order and practicing social distancing, including wearing a mask or cloth-face covering if you go out in public,” said Dee Vernberg, a senior analyst at the local health department, in the release.

Other results from the survey included the following:

• The 1% of respondents who said they have experienced COVID-19 symptoms within the last two weeks came from all over the county. They reported that they live in Lawrence, Eudora, Baldwin City and Lecompton, in addition to unincorporated parts of the county.

• About 600 additional respondents said that they experienced symptoms related to COVID-19 but that those symptoms had been resolved or had not occurred within the last two weeks.

• Only 59 respondents said they had been tested for COVID-19. Of those, five tested positive, 50 tested negative and four were unknown.

In Douglas County, 39 out of the 44 people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 have recovered, Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health said in its daily update Thursday afternoon.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s online map noted that 1,135 Douglas County residents have been tested for the disease so far. The county’s testing rate per 1,000 people was 9.28.

The daily update from LMH Health announced that, as of 8:30 a.m. Thursday, there was one patient at Lawrence’s hospital with COVID-19 and one other who was under investigation for the virus.