One July, counted properly
July 2019 brought two extreme heat events to Kansas, and KDHE tracked what they did to emergency departments. Across that month 352 emergency department visits were identified as heat-related illness. The daily count peaked at 34 on July 9, when the maximum temperature averaged across the stations used was 93 degrees. A second pair of spikes, 30 visits each, fell on July 17 and July 20 when that average was 100 degrees or above[1].
The distribution of those visits is the reason this article exists. Males accounted for 260 of the 352, which is 73.9 percent, and females for 92. The age bracket with the most visits was 18 to 44. The department drew its own conclusion from that shape and printed it: heat-related illnesses occur more frequently among males in the 18 to 44 age group, and this is likely due to performing work outdoors[1]. That inference belongs to KDHE.
How the count was made, and why there is not a newer one
The count came from syndromic surveillance rather than from diagnoses. The Kansas Syndromic Surveillance Program received emergency department data from 87 of the 137 Kansas emergency departments then reporting, in 2019, covering 88.7 percent of Kansas emergency department visits. Suspected cases were identified with the CDC ESSENCE Heat Related Illness v2 definition, and the text of each was reviewed by hand to drop false positives. The visits were then set against the maximum temperature average for 13 weather stations reporting to the National Weather Service[1].
The report states its own limits in three lines: not all hospitals report to the program, not everyone treated for heat-related illness is seen in a hospital, and the query may have missed some illnesses[1]. Those are the right limits to carry, and they run in one direction. Every one of them makes 352 an undercount of something.
It is a 2019 figure, and it is the most recent Kansas count this article could establish. The report names the body that would publish a newer one: continued surveillance of heat-related illness is a function of the department's Environmental Public Health Tracking program, which the report says provides ongoing monitoring[1]. An annual Kansas heat-illness count is that program's to publish. This article does not have one, and no figure has been substituted for it.
The exposure, which is measured every day
The other half of the subject is not thin at all. The Weather Service forecast office at Wichita publishes a hundred-degree climatology for Wichita Eisenhower National Airport, and on the official 1991 to 2020 normals the station averages 12.4 days a year at or above 100 degrees. July supplies 5.9 of them and August 4.4[2].
The years do not behave like the average. The record year is 2011, with 53 such days. The longest unbroken run is 20 days, August 7 to 26, 1936. The earliest in a year the station has reached 100 is May 4, 2014, and the latest September 28, 1953. Since July 1888, when climate records commenced in Wichita, only seven years failed to reach 100 degrees at all, and the last of those was 1927[2].
Counting the station's own daily maximum temperatures gives the same top years as the Weather Service page wherever the two overlap, and extends the series to the present: 2025 produced a single day at or above 100 degrees, and 2026 had produced 20 of them by September 1[4]. Those last two are counts made over the daily record here rather than figures the Weather Service printed, and the difference between them is the reason an average is a poor description of a Kansas summer.
| Year | Days at or above 100 degrees |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 53 |
| 1936 | 50 |
| 1980 | 46 |
| 1978 | 42 |
| 1954 | 42 |
| 1934 | 40 |
| 2012 | 36 |
| 2000 | 33 |
| 1956 | 31 |
| 1990 | 28 |
Who is outside, and why nobody counts them
The vital above reads "not published" because it is. No federal or Kansas series counts workers by whether their work is outdoors. What is published is employment by industry, and the two are not the same question.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts total covered employment in Kansas at 1,429,358 as a 2024 annual average. Within the private sector, construction accounted for 71,160 jobs across 7,680 establishments, and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting for 13,020 jobs across 1,908[3]. Set beside the state total those two sectors are a small share of Kansas employment, and that comparison is exactly where the figure stops being useful.
It stops there for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. The census counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance, so self-employed farmers and many farm proprietors are outside it altogether, which matters most in exactly the industry the question is about. And a great deal of construction work happens indoors. The nearest published alternative is the bureau's occupational series, which counts occupations rather than exposure and so would still not answer the question. A count of Kansans whose working day is spent outdoors would have to come from a survey that asked, and no agency runs one.
Two numbers, two blind spots
The illness figure sees people who reached an emergency department at one of 87 reporting facilities in one month of one year[1]. The exposure figure is one airport in one city[2], and the department itself used 13 stations when it wanted to set temperature against illness[1]. Neither one is wrong. Both are narrower than the sentence people want to build out of them.
What sits between them, the working day itself, is the part with no measurement at all. Heat is not the only pressure on that day, and the account of what Kansas farm families report, and of the line the state runs for them, is the nearest thing this publication has to the other side of it. What else gets measured here, and by whom, is the subject of everything that begins at this publication's front page.