It’s the deadliest day for COVID-19 in Kentucky. 58 new deaths and 3,728 cases.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 3,728 new cases of COVID-19 across Kentucky on Thursday, as well as a record-breaking 58 coronavirus-related deaths.
Those deaths included a 31-year-old woman in Jefferson County, a 45-year-old woman in Daviess County and a 93-year-old man from McCracken County. The death toll has reached 3,301, and the state has reported a total of 338,034 cases.
“It is staggering,” Beshear said. Thursday’s high death toll “is because we’ve had so many cases recently, as we saw that exponential growth that we were able to stop, as we’ve seen that post-holiday bump,” he said.
Thursday’s new case tally makes it the 16th-highest day for cases. It’s the lowest rate of new cases on a Thursday in more than four weeks, he noted. “It does appear . . . that we are seeing a decline. But we are still at a level higher than we should be,” Beshear said.
The positivity rate has dipped again slightly to 11.05 percent.
There are 1,604 people hospitalized with the coronavirus, 395 of whom are in intensive care (four fewer than Wednesday), and 209 on ventilators (four more). There are close to 80 new infections among residents in long-term care facilities and 55 among staff, bringing the total number of active cases to 1,530.
Residents of long-term care facilities have suffered greatly throughout the pandemic; the vast majority of people who’ve died from the virus in Kentucky have been residents in these facilities. And while they, along with facility staff, have been offered at least an initial dose of the vaccine, Beshear said the state doesn’t have data on the percentage of staff in those facilities who agreed to be immunized. That’s in part because CVS Health and Walgreens are responsible for inoculating those groups.
“We’re not running that program, but we will check with Walgreens and CVS to determine exactly what type of statistics they have,” Beshear said.
With fewer than two weeks to go before Kentucky opens a number of regional high-volume drive-thru vaccination sites through a partnership with Kroger, Beshear said the state continues to grapple with a limited supply of vaccine. Beshear said there’s been no response to his Jan. 19 letter to the federal government asking that Kentucky’s allocation be immediately doubled.
“We’re ready to give [doses] to you,” Beshear said. “The supply simply isn’t there. We can’t give vaccines we don’t have.”
Like the state, Lexington’s number of new cases is no longer necessarily escalating, but its death rate is holding steady. More than 10 percent of the city’s coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in January. Another three deaths were reported Thursday morning by the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department. In total since the start of the new year, the department has reported 19 deaths.
This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 4:39 PM.
