New Kentucky COVID-19 cases top 1,000 Tuesday. State on pace for another record week.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 1,018 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Tuesday, bringing the state’s case total to 67,856. Eight more people with the coronavirus have died, he said, putting the death toll at 1,170.
Tuesday’s number of new cases is the second-highest reported by the state in a single day. “It ought to be a wake-up call,” Beshear said. “What this means is we are on pace to have even more cases than last week where we set a record number of cases.”
The official rate of positive tests, a seven-day average, remains below 5 percent, at 4.24 percent. In addition to the second-highest number of daily cases, Kentucky reported 72,808 new tests on Tuesday, the second-highest amount announced in a single day since the start of the pandemic. A total of 1,446,385 tests have been administered since early March.
In K-12 schools, where individual schools and districts began self-reporting new coronavirus cases among students and staff Monday in a live dashboard, at least 15 new students and 14 staff have tested positive.
The data on the dashboard has not yet been vetted by local health departments, Beshear said, but it’s intended to provide an “immediate idea of what we may be seeing in your school or your community,” to help school officials quickly adapt their decisions, such as whether to return to virtual only.
The dashboard reported 123 students and 49 staff are newly infected so far this week, with another 844 students and 123 staff in quarantine.
In Kentucky colleges and universities, there were 303 additional positive cases in students and two new cases in staff. At least 1,374 students and 48 staff actively have the virus. The University of Kentucky is reporting 484 students are currently positive, according to state data, followed by Western Kentucky University’s 368 active cases.
In nursing and assisted living homes, 38 residents and 23 staff contracted the virus since Monday, Beshear said, bringing the total number of active cases to 576 among residents and 437 among staff.
Beshear on Monday said the state was climbing toward its third surge in coronavirus cases, guaranteed to be fueled in part by many K-12 students returning to the classroom this week. That escalation is evident in Lexington where, over the weekend, the city set its one-month record for new cases and tied the record for deaths.
According to the Department of Public Health’s color-coded incidence rate map, Lexington remains in the orange, with 22.3 cases per 100,000 people, which means virus spread is considered “accelerated.” Last week the city improved to orange from red — when a county reports more than 25 cases per 100,000 people, categorizing spread as “critical.”
Previously, if a county was classified as red, the state recommended its K-12 schools wait until the incidence rate in their county dropped back down to yellow — 1-10 cases per 100,000 people — before in-person classes resumed. Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky’s public health commissioner, removed that standard on Tuesday, meaning as long as a county isn’t in the red, a district can have in-person learning.
“It is not our intent to strand people in the wrong categorization,” Stack explained. Rather, the color-coded map is intended to identify “when the disease is particularly active in your community.”
There are 589 people hospitalized with the virus — the most since Sept. 1 — 129 of whom are in intensive care, and 81 are on ventilators.
This story was originally published September 29, 2020 at 4:41 PM.
