Beshear reports largest Monday COVID-19 increase. Hospitalizations, positivity rate up.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 647 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Monday and nine new deaths, bringing the state’s case total to 88,247 and increasing the death toll to 1,326.
Beshear said it’s the largest single-day new case increase on a Monday, the day of the week that tends to bring the fewest number of new cases because of weekend lab schedules.
Monday’s case volume is yet another sign that the virus is not letting up in Kentucky, the governor said. “My concern about this [escalation] is it’s not just regional. It’s all over the country.”
The state’s positivity rate is 4.97 percent — the highest since Aug. 25. Beshear again implored Kentuckians to be “more vigilant” in taking precautions against the virus as the colder weather will push more gatherings inside, where the virus is more likely to spread. This poses a threat to Kentucky’s health care system, where hospitalizations due to the virus have been at an all-time high for the last two days — 744 people were hospitalized on Sunday and 764 were on Monday.
Thirty-five percent of Kentucky’s hospital bed capacity is currently available and 29 percent of the state’s intensive care unit beds are open, though that could “change very quickly as we continue to see numbers increase,” Beshear said. Of the 764 people currently hospitalized with the virus, 190 are in intensive care and 89 are on ventilators.
Despite the marked increase across metrics, Beshear announced no new restrictions to try and slow the escalating spread of the virus.
“We are not currently looking at new restrictions, but we have got to get these numbers down,” he said. “We know how to stop the spread of the virus, we’ve just got to be willing to do it.”
In nursing homes, there are 40 new cases among residents and 24 new cases among nursing home staff. Overall, 971 residents and 609 staff are dealing with active cases of the virus. At the Thomson-Hood Veterans Center in Wilmore, which is experiencing an outbreak of the virus, another veteran who contracted the virus has died, and three more veterans have tested positive, Beshear said.
In Kentucky’s K-12 schools on Monday, Beshear reported 23 new virus cases among students and seven among staff. Over the last 14 days, the Department of Public Health has counted 345 cases among students and 181 among staff.
K-12 schools each day must log new coronavirus-related information into a live dashboard managed by the state, but not all schools are complying. Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman on Monday said 162 schools out of 1,722 have yet to report any information into the dashboard since it went live three weeks ago.
Beshear said spread of the virus appears to be slowing at the state’s colleges and universities. Thirty-one new cases among students were reported on Monday, and over the last two weeks, those institutions have logged 387 new cases.
Kentucky ended last week having set yet another weekly record for new COVID-19 cases, with Beshear reporting 7,352. The week before saw 7,444, but 1,426 of those cases were backlogged cases from Fayette County. The number of new cases has risen, week over week, since early September.
New cases are once again escalating slightly in Fayette County after flattening out earlier this month, and officials at the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department say University of Kentucky students are not driving the increase. Still, the county remains in the “orange zone,” with 23.9 cases per 100,000 people, according to the state health department’s color-coded incidence rate map.
Last Monday’s chart showed 25 counties in the “red zone.” By Monday, Oct. 19, the number of red counties had jumped to 44. If the virus continues to saturate the state at this rate, it may mean organized group activities, such as high school winter sports, may need to be restricted or canceled.
“If we don’t get ahold of cases exploding, it is going to make it a real challenge with winter sports,” Beshear said.
Deaths are also on the rise statewide. Sixty-three deaths attributable to the virus were announced last week, compared with 44 the week before. “This virus is real, and it is cruel,” Beshear said.
The majority of Americans likely won’t have access to a COVID-19 vaccine this winter, Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky’s public health commissioner, said Monday. What’s more likely, he said, is that a vaccine will become available this winter in “relatively small” quantities reserved for targeted populations, such as frontline health care workers.
Incrementally over the following months, it’s realistic that “progressively larger quantities of the vaccine” will be given to states dole out to other high-risk populations, such as nursing home staff, Stack said. The average American isn’t likely to have access to a vaccine “probably until early summer.”
Stack said he was “cautiously hopeful” that by the end of next year, “everybody who has wanted the vaccine will have had the chance to have [it].”
This story was originally published October 19, 2020 at 5:00 PM.
