With 2,135 cases to start holiday week, Beshear warns of ‘even darker place’ on COVID-19
After a record-breaking week of new infections, Gov. Andy Beshear on Monday announced 2,135 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky and five more deaths.
The latest case increase is the highest ever recorded on a Monday. The state has reported a total of 160,232 cases and 1,792 total deaths. Last week, Kentucky logged roughly 20,000 new cases of the coronavirus.
“The surge is real,” the governor said. “We have so much [COVID-19] right now, it overwhelms any area and all our defenses.”
Statewide, the positivity rate is 8.97 percent. There are 1,573 people hospitalized with the virus and 391 are in intensive care — both single-day records. Of those, 203 are on a ventilator. So far in November, 2,320 people have become sick enough to be hospitalized and 626 have been admitted to intensive care, more than two times the previous record in August.
New infections, hospitalizations and virus deaths continue to soar even as many Kentuckians prepare to gather for Thanksgiving — a holiday that public health officials and state leaders warn could supercharge spread of the virus across the commonwealth if people aren’t careful. And state coronavirus figures already don’t bode well; the month of November so far has a higher positivity rate than any other month in the pandemic: 8.92 percent.
Beshear warned again Monday that Kentucky’s health care system is nearing its tipping point with hospital capacity and available staff. If that happens, “there’s nobody coming to help us [and] there’s no one coming to our aid,” he said. “We have to protect ourselves and the threat is so very real.”
The state last week instituted new restrictions and recommendations to help slow the accelerating spread, he said, because if Kentucky has yet another record-setting week of new infections, “we’re headed to an even darker place than we’re headed right now.”
Beshear and Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky’s public health commissioner, have in recent weeks tried different routes of appeal to convince unwilling Kentuckians to change their minds and wear a mask. At the top of his update Monday, Beshear asked people to wear masks to protect frontline health care workers.
“We owe these people more and better than we’ve been giving them,” he said. Kentucky’s escalation is so dangerous that if it doesn’t slow down soon, the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients will outnumber available staff, he said: “very soon, we could have more people who need help . . . than there are enough of them to help us.”
Since late last week, 15 additional child care centers have reported at least one new case of the virus, and 19 staff and 16 kids have tested positive.
In nursing homes, there are 138 new cases of the virus among residents and 135 among staff. Overall, these facilities are monitoring 1,753 active cases among residents and 1,100 among nursing home staff. Thirty-seven more residents and one staff member have also died. Two more inmates from the Kentucky State Reformatory who had tested positive have also died, Beshear said.
Lexington set another record over the weekend for number of new cases and hospitalizations. For the last seven days, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department recorded a record 2,340 new cases and 67 hospitalizations.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 4:43 PM.
