KY finds 260 COVID-19 deaths from early days of the pandemic. Senior centers opening.
Kentucky’s 195 senior centers will reopen at full capacity on June 11, when the state is set to lift most of its COVID-19 restrictions, Gov. Andy Beshear said Tuesday.
Beshear announced last month that he is lifting all coronavirus restrictions on June 11 except for those in places where people are the most vulnerable, such as nursing homes and prisons. With more than 80 percent of Kentuckians over 65 vaccinated, Beshear said it’s now safe to reopen senior centers.
“The reason we can do that is vaccines,” Beshear said. “These things are miracles, they have effectively ended death and hospitalization for most people.”
While more than 2 million Kentuckians have been vaccinated so far — the equivalent of about 46 percent of the population — the pace has slackened over the past month.
Through Monday, the state had reported more than 275,000 people vaccinated in the month of May, which is an average of about 8,966 people a day.
Once the vaccine was approved for children between 12 and 15 years old, the number of people getting vaccinated ticked up slightly. So far, 58,220 Kentucky children between 12 years old and 17 years old have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine.
Fayette County has the third-highest vaccination rate in the state, at 58 percent of the population.
Beshear announced one new COVID-19 death, a man from Breckinridge County, but the state has been working to track deaths that were missed over the course of the pandemic. On Tuesday, Beshear announced that an audit found 260 new COVID-19 deaths that spanned between March 20, 2020 and October 26, 2020.
“We’ve got to make sure that when someone has lost someone that we recognize that pain and that loss,” Beshear said.
A total of 7,067 Kentuckians have died over the course of the pandemic. Beshear said the new deaths did not affect the state’s overall mortality rate from COVID-19, which is 1.5 percent.
Beshear announced 137 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday. Last week marked the fewest new COVID-19 cases since June 2020 and the fourth straight week of declining cases. At least 458,712 Kentuckians have caught COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
As restaurants have struggled to hire employees during the pandemic, a political debate has emerged over whether Beshear should prevent Kentuckians on unemployment from receiving an extra $300 a week on top of their unemployment insurance. Beshear said to do so would slow consumer spending and that it would have the potential to hurt people who need unemployment money to feed their families.
“Some folks want to look only at this idea that there may be some who are staying home because of this money,” Beshear said. “But they would cut this program for people who don’t have childcare ... they’re not thinking about the folks that need school to be in the place that I know it’s going to be in the fall. They’re not looking at people whose jobs may no longer exist.”
Beshear said if Kentucky joined the 23 states that have said they will end the extra unemployment benefits before they are set to expire in September, it would result in a slower economic recovery from the pandemic.
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 4:47 PM.
