Kentucky county long unscathed by coronavirus suffered deadly spike in October
Lee County, where the Kentucky River forms among the steep hills and an annual festival is named for the woolly worm, had been touched only lightly by the novel coronavirus much of the year even as it spread illness and death elsewhere around Kentucky.
The county was one of the last in the state to have a documented case of COVID-19, and by early October had still seen only 15 cases since the pandemic surfaced in March, and no deaths.
On Oct. 9, the county was the only one in Kentucky with no documented cases.
Those days are just a nice memory now. The county has been through a spike in cases that gave it at the second-highest case rate in the state last week.
The county’s rate on Oct. 28 hit 166 per 100,000 residents in the formula the state uses to calculate the incidence level on a seven-day average. Anything over 25 is considered critical — a red zone where greater restrictions are needed to slow the spread of the virus.
Worse, there have been nine deaths attributed to COVID-19.
“We exploded,” said county Judge-Executive Chuck Caudill Jr. “One of my worst fears came to fruition.”
As in some other counties, a nursing home drove the recent outbreak in Lee County.
Most of the cases found so far have been associated with Lee County Care & Rehabilitation Center, operated by Signature Healthcare.
The facility had seen a total of 80 residents and nearly 60 staff members test positive as of early this week, said Scott Lockard, director of the Kentucky River District Health Department.
All the county’s deaths were among residents of the facility.
“It has decimated the facility. It’s heartbreaking,” Lockard said.
The nursing home is among the largest employers in the rural county, so the deaths and the positive cases touched a lot of families.
“We’re just a small town and everybody knows everybody,” said Debbie Dunaway, who owns Beattyville Florist.
The shop provided flowers at the funerals of two nursing home residents who died.
Lockard said it wasn’t clear how the outbreak started in the facility.
One thing that is clear, he said, is that even with most of the county’s cases concentrated at the nursing home, the outbreak creates greater potential for coronavirus to spread in the community as well.
Employees, after all, live and shop in Beattyville and elsewhere, and residents leave the facility for medical appointments.
Health workers tested 40 Lee County residents on Oct. 26, and six were positive for COVID-19, Lockard said — a rate of 15 percent in that batch of tests.
Renewed emphasis on masks
The outbreak had a number of repercussions.
Caudill said businesses put renewed emphasis on masks for customers, and he started getting more reports from people about businesses that weren’t doing a good job enforcing the guidance on mask-wearing.
Local officials said most people had done a good job sticking to the precautions even before the recent rise in cases, but Lee County has seen the same pushback over masks as in other parts of the country, with some shunning face coverings as an infringement on their rights.
“Some of’m say it’s controlling them to wear a mask,” said Pamela Fox, of Beattyville.
Fox disagrees.
She takes care of her 81-year-old mother, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, or COPD, which would put her at increased risk for serious problems if she contracted COVID-19.
So to Fox, wearing a mask is a common-sense way to protect people like her mother.
“If I were to go somewhere and bring it in, it would kill her,” Fox said.
The recent spike in cases has quieted the mask naysayers, said Caudill, a Republican who ran for office after a career in the U.S. Navy.
“There’s a vacuum where they used to be very vocal,” he said.
Gov. Andy Beshear on Wednesday issued a 30-day extension of his order for adults and children over 5 to wear masks in most public settings as cases continue to rise around the state.
Caudill has preached for months on social media and in local newspaper columns on the wisdom of wearing masks and other measures to slow the spread of the virus, such as staying out of crowds and practicing social distancing.
He reiterated that with businesses when COVID-19 cases started rising, saying in his newspaper column that he would remind businesses that the health department has the authority to cite stores if they weren’t enforcing mask and social-distancing requirements.
Caudill took other measures as well, including staggering staffing at the courthouse to reduce the number of people in the building and canceling rentals at the Happy Top Community Center until at least mid-November to prevent gatherings.
Ambulance service strained
The jump in cases put strain on the county-run ambulance service, said Jon Allen, who heads the service and is county emergency manager.
The volume of runs went up 25 percent for a couple of weeks.
“My folks just ran a lot more,” Allen said.
Allen was pressed into service to drive on some shifts after two employees had to take off because of potential exposure, and the service called in ambulances from another county for help on several runs.
The county school system switched to online-only instruction with the quick rise in cases.
Superintendent Sarah Wasson said that was the safest thing to do while tracing the ties between the school system and people who had tested positive.
The risk of returning to in-person classes too soon is that students and staff could spread the virus, making more people sick or requiring more to quarantine and requiring an even longer shutdown, Wasson said in a message to parents.
“We just don’t want to contribute to the numbers,” Wasson said.
Laura Smallwood, who works at the Bobcat Dairy Bar in Beattyville, said more people have been wearing masks recently when they come to the carryout window to pick up orders.
“It’s getting bad,” she said of the virus.
The county’s case rate has gone down significantly in recent days from the high calculated a week ago.
But Lee County’s experience in October is a lesson in how quickly the virus can flare up and change life in a community, and in the need for continued diligence, Lockard said.
“We can’t get complacent,” he said. “This can get a whole lot worse.”
