655 new KY COVID-19 cases and 12 deaths. $400 unemployment payments could be coming.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 655 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Wednesday, increasing the state’s case total to 40,926. Twelve more people with the virus have also died for a second day in a row, putting the death toll at 842.
Beshear, at his daily update, said the double-digit deaths are likely the result of last month’s infection surge. “We’re at the point where we’re starting to see the deaths resulting from this spike,” he said.
Those deaths include a 42-year-old man in Warren County; a 62-year-old man in Oldham County; a 58-year-old woman in Hart County; and a 91-year-old man in Logan County.
Increasingly, more of the people dying from the virus don’t live in nursing and assisted living homes, he said. “It truly shows you where community spread is, and it means we’ve got a heck of a job in front of us, but I believe we’re up to it,” Beshear said.
Wednesday’s new positives include 91 kids and teenagers ages 18 and younger, Beshear said, including five 18-year-olds. The state’s rate of people testing positive, a seven-day average, is down slightly to 5.41 percent.
Yesterday, Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack said the state would track positive cases at K-12 schools. On Wednesday, Beshear said the state will also track infections at colleges and universities. Personal information will be protected, but charting that information will give local health departments a better chance at discerning which cases are caused by community spread and which are the result of campus clusters, he said.
In nursing and assisted living homes, two more people have died — a resident and a staff member — and 25 residents and 17 staff tested positive. There are 763 active coronavirus cases among residents and staff.
Unemployment boost coming?
As the state continues to to process a backlog of unemployment benefit claims, Beshear said the state Labor Cabinet will apply Thursday for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Lost Wages Assistance Program to provide $400 in additional relief.
Under the program, qualifying Kentuckians would get an additional $400 in benefits a week. At least initially, though, it’ll come in a three-week installment, retroactively applying to the three-week period of July 26 to Aug. 15, after the original $600 federal benefit expired.
FEMA would pay $300 of that amount and the state would supplement another $100 using CARES Act funding. If approved, those payments likely wouldn’t arrive until September, Beshear said.
Only seven other states have so far applied for unemployment relief through this program, he said.
“While there is still some uncertainty in this new program, it is just too important to get these dollars to our families,” he said.
There are 640 people currently hospitalized with the virus across the state, 155 of whom are in intensive care and 90 of whom are on ventilators. At least 785,138 tests have been administered.
Dr. Stack or Dr Pepper?
Earlier in the day at a news conference about fall athletics, Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, questioned the credibility of the state’s coronavirus data, saying he was “perplexed” by some of it.
Beshear, in his daily update, bucked that notion. Not only is it thoroughly aggregated by a team of people, it’s audited almost daily, he said.
But “here’s the problem: when you just want to do what you want to do, you attack the data, whether it’s ours or the president’s, and you’re not going to believe anything we put out there,” Beshear said sharply.
“Senate leadership, they’re not making decisions with Dr. [Deborah] Birx,” — the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator — “they’re not making decisions with Dr. Stack, they’re making decisions [with’] Dr Pepper.”
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 4:26 PM.
