Kentucky confirms its first cases of COVID-19 variant that spreads more easily
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 2,714 new cases of COVID-19 across Kentucky on Tuesday and 35 additional virus-related deaths, bringing the state’s total number of cases to 350,528 and lifting the death toll to 3,495.
Beshear also said Kentucky has confirmed its first two cases of the more transmissible COVID-19 variant that has been circulating in the United Kingdom.
“Public health Commissioner Dr. Steven Stack is going to talk about this more tomorrow,” Beshear said in a short video update. “The U.K. variant does spread more aggressively, but he’ll take us through all the implications of having this strain here.”
The statewide positivity rate continued its fall below 10 percent on Tuesday, settling at 9.63 percent. On Monday, the rate of Kentuckians testing positive fell below 10 percent for the first time since late December.
There are 1,566 people hospitalized with COVID-19 (27 more than Monday), 491 of whom are in intensive care (117 more) and 228 are on a ventilator (25 more). In long-term care facilities, there are new positive cases among 32 residents and 51 staff, bringing their total number of active cases to 1,183.
The Biden Administration announced on Tuesday it planned to increase the amount of vaccine doses it doles out to states for at least three weeks, beginning next week. The White House plans to up the minimum amount of doses it distributes from 8.6 million to 10 million, which breaks down to 17 percent more per state.
Beshear said it was a “great start.” The announcement comes roughly a week after the governor sent a letter to Jeff Zients, head of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 response team, requesting the federal government “immediately double” Kentucky’s allocation of doses. Zients informed governors, including Beshear, of the planned increase on a call Tuesday afternoon.
Federal officials also vowed to give state leaders better insight into how many doses they can expect to receive, allowing them to better plan rollout efforts.
“This is going to help us plan, which is going to help our providers out there be able to plan,” Beshear said. “One of the tough things we’ve been dealing with is only knowing on a Tuesday what we would have the next week and not knowing what we would have in the weeks after.”
Beshear’s office is less than two weeks away from partnering with Kroger to set up regional drive-thru vaccination sites across the state, designed to inoculate large numbers of people each day — an effort that will be dampened without a fairly immediate uptick in the state’s reserve of doses, Beshear said.
Kentucky is currently working through immunizing people in priority groups 1A and 1B, including health care personnel, first responders, and K-12 personnel. Earlier on Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new study showing in-person schooling may be safe if certain protocols are taken in the classroom and restrictions are levied in local communities. If teachers, staff and students wear masks and maintain proper social distancing, in-person learning can be safe, as long as other activities that bring people together inside, such as indoor dining at restaurants and bars, are strictly regulated in order to keep community spread at bay, according to the CDC. Indoor sports at schools would also need to be limited.
While many schools have returned to in-person learning intermittently across Kentucky since the fall, some districts have remained virtual for the better part of a year, including Fayette County schools. Beshear is relying on the mass immunization of the state’s K-12 personnel — roughly 85,000 people, whom he has told will have access to their first dose by the end of the first week in February — to ensure a safe return to the classroom.
On Monday, there were new infections among at least 434 students and and 186 staff, according to the Kentucky Department of Public Health’s K-12 dashboard. At least 2,507 students and 331 staff are in quarantine.
This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 6:00 PM.
