Kentucky opening COVID-19 vaccinations to everyone 16 and older starting Monday
Kentuckians who are 16 and older will become eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine starting Monday, April 5, Gov. Andy Beshear announced on Wednesday.
“That will be a complete opening of all our vaccination sites,” he said in a live update. The coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech is currently the only vaccine available to 16- and 17-year-olds. The Moderna vaccine and the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot are available to people 18 and older.
Starting Monday of this week, anyone over the age of 40 was given the go ahead to sign up for their vaccine in Kentucky. People between the ages of 16 and 39 in the commonwealth were previously told they’d be able to sign up for a dose by April 12, but Beshear said he was pushing that date up a week because hundreds, if not thousands of available slots were still going unfilled at the state’s nearly 600 vaccine sites.
Some sites with a surplus of appointments include Norton Healthcare, the Northern Kentucky Convention Center, Kentucky Dam Village Convention Center and Baptist Health Madisonville. More information about vaccine locations is available at vaccine.ky.gov.
Beshear also announced 815 new coronavirus cases and 25 more virus-related deaths, three of which were from November, December and January, and were discovered through the state’s separate audit of coronavirus deaths.
Though the state has reported a week-over-week drop in new cases since early January, it’s possible that streak could end this week and Kentucky’s case decline could plateau, Beshear said. Last week, 4,154 new cases were reported. By Wednesday of this week, the state had already logged 2,210 new cases.
The rate of hospitalizations has also started to increase, again: 413 people are hospitalized with coronavirus (35 more than Tuesday), 110 are on a ventilator (19 more); and 48 are on a ventilator (11 more).
The positivity rate is up slightly to 2.96 percent. The state has detected at least 66 cases of the more contagious coronavirus variant that originated in the United Kingdom.
At least 1,352,477 people have received their first dose of vaccine — 20,514 of whom got their shot on Tuesday.
Beshear said “all interested inmates” within Kentucky’s correctional system will have access to the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine as early as next week. All correctional facilities will get doses next week except the Kentucky State Penitentiary and the Western Kentucky Correctional Complex, both of which are still dealing with active outbreaks, Beshear said.
Though the three vaccines granted emergency authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are currently only available to older teens, one may soon be in reach for younger teenagers. In findings from a clinical trial released Wednesday, Pfizer-BioNTech said their companies’ vaccine is very effective in adolescents 12 to 15 years old. Eligibility could potentially be expanded in the coming weeks, Beshear said.
“It means just about all middle and high school students could be vaccinated, certainly before they step into the classroom in the fall,” he said.
The collective wearing of masks until a bigger majority of the population is vaccinated will continue to be the norm in the commonwealth. Unlike in neighboring Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb is letting the statewide mask mandate expire on April 6, Beshear continues to hold firm in keeping Kentucky’s mask mandate in place — a decision supported by President Joe Biden and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 4:29 PM.
