New KY coronavirus cases fluctuating. 1,781 cases and 23 deaths Tuesday.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 1,781 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday and 23 additional deaths, as thousands of Kentuckians continue to receive their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
The daily increase in cases is low compared to Monday’s more than 2,300 cases and other recent Tuesday totals — the last two Tuesday’s brought close to 3,000 cases. Beshear said it’s not clear why the daily totals are zig-zagging: “Coming out of the holidays, our numbers are wonky,” he said. “It’s going to take a little bit of time for us to see the data on exactly what the causes are.”
The rate of people testing positive remains high, at 11.36 percent, which is “cause for concern,” the governor said. There are 1,760 people hospitalized with COVID-19. Of those, 430 are in intensive care and 215 are on a ventilator.
Kentucky was slated to receive 202,650 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines by the end of December. That allotment is still trickling in, Beshear said, and next week, the state expects to get 27,300 more doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 26,500 doses of the Moderna vaccine.
“We’re only receiving the information about how many doses we’ll even have a week in advance,” which makes scheduling appointments to administer those doses for select populations tricky, Beshear said. “Without a fully guaranteed schedule,” he said, “there is a limit to how far out we can project.”
Since Monday, 6,168 more doses of the vaccine were administered statewide, meaning at least 66,582 people have received the first dose. While Beshear said that’s likely the most doses given in a day so far, it’s still a fraction of the total amount Kentucky has on hand. On Monday, Kentucky had only administered about 35 percent of the total doses it had received.
Since vaccine doses are not yet available to a majority of Kentuckians, control over community spread still hinges in part on the effort of more than 1,500 contact tracers and disease investigators working to ensure people who test positive isolate and people who are exposed quarantine.
Since the fall, close to 60 percent of Kentuckians with exposure have quarantined, said Mark Carter, who leads the state’s contact tracing effort. But general compliance with quarantine and isolation protocols has waned in recent months, he said. Contact tracing efforts, he estimates, have prevented 450 deaths and upwards of 2,350 hospitalizations.
Among staff and residents in nursing and assisted living homes, who are among the first in the state to have access to a vaccine, 113 more residents and 118 staff have tested positive.
Walgreens and CVS, which have federal contracts to dole out vaccines at those facilities, immunized nearly 2,200 residents and staff between Monday and Tuesday. Beshear said Walgreens expects to finish its first round of vaccinations (both the Moderna and Pfizer shots require a follow-up booster) as early as this week.
As more populations become eligible for a dose, the goal is to set up sites that can safely immunize large numbers of people quickly, Beshear said. Like the drive-thru site at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville that opened Monday to health care workers, he said people should expect similar sites to pop up in the coming weeks.
“We’re going to have larger regional sites within every region in the state,” Beshear said.
The big lift of a mass immunization, as Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack said Monday, will be trying to administer as many doses to as many people as possible, as fast as possible — a goal that hinges on a number of complicated logistics, including scheduling and community outreach to ensure eligible groups are notified.
The challenge, Beshear said, “is not as much the medical administration, but the underlying logistics of doing it in a way that doesn’t expose people.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM.
