14 Kentucky coronavirus deaths and 776 new cases. Hospitalizations top 700.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 776 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Tuesday, bringing the state’s total to 81,691. He also announced 14 deaths, bringing the death toll to 1,269.
The number of new cases was down from 1,054 last Tuesday.
“We’re going to watch this through this week,” Beshear said. “Because as you know, we’ve been on this escalation and we want to watch to see if we’re seeing any stabilization. Obviously it’s early, but it is something that we hope for.”
There are 704 people hospitalized with COVID-19 — the highest since August 7. Of those, 170 are in intensive care, including 90 on a ventilator.
Beshear noted hospitalizations have increased from 589 two weeks ago, but said Kentucky’s hospitals still have enough capacity to treat everyone.
With an additional 27,140 tests announced Tuesday, Kentucky’s official positivity rate is 4.59 percent. The state will start calculating the rate of positive tests based only on labs that report their results electronically, rather than a combination of manually and electronically entered data.
Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky’s public health commissioner, said the positivity rate is not the most instructive metric for determining how rampant the virus is in a particular community and that a better measure is the incidence rate, which takes the number of cases and calculates a rate based on population.
According to the White House, Kentucky is in the “red zone” with 63 percent of its 120 counties displaying a moderate or high transmission rate. There are 31 counties in the “red zone,” compared to 26 the week before.
Stack said cases are increasing rapidly in many of the state’s rural counties, compared to earlier weeks when many of the cases were in larger cities.
“This disease and who it affects continues to change,” Stack said.
The state’s coronavirus dashboard for K-12 schools shows there are 798 students and 137 staff in quarantine. Over the past two weeks, 384 students and 190 students have tested positive for the virus.
Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman said more 200 of the 1,732 schools in the database have still not reported their COVID-19 activity over the last two weeks.
“That is unacceptable and irresponsible,” Coleman said. “It jeopardizes the health of your students, your school staff, their families and your community. We all want our children back in their classrooms where they can learn from their teachers and be with their friends.”
She said schools that are not reporting, and not being accountable to their community, are hurting that process.
There are currently 788 active cases among nursing home residents and 505 active cases among nursing home staff. The percentage of Kentuckians over 80 who have died from the virus has decreased since July, when it was around 20 percent of the people who caught the virus. It is currently around 15 percent.
Beshear and his family tested negative for the virus Tuesday and Beshear said they will be tested again Friday because the incubation period of the virus can take time. The family has been in quarantine since Sunday.
This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 4:40 PM.
