KY records its 10,000th COVID-19 death as month-long decline shows signs of stalling
After nearly two months of sharp declines in weekly COVID-19 cases and the statewide positivity rate in Kentucky, those metrics are plateauing, Gov. Andy Beshear said on Monday.
Kentucky’s rate of residents testing positive increased last week for the first time in more than a month. After dropping most every day last month, declining from 9.67% on October 1 to a low of 4.98% on Halloween, the leading indicator of spread had ticked back up to 5.19% on Friday. On Monday, it hit 5.44%.
Similarly, “the decline in cases is slowing significantly,” Beshear said in a news conference.
The week-over-week case total has dropped for nearly eight consecutive weeks, and the first week of November was no exception. But it was the “smallest [weekly decrease] it has been in the entire decline,” he added. For multiple weeks in October, the volume of new cases declined by the thousands. Last week the difference was 675 cases. On Monday, the state reported 642 new cases and 26 deaths.
These metric shifts “suggest to me we’re plateauing,” Beshear said. “I don’t know if I ought to say there ought to be a wake-up call now because the current trend has [otherwise] been really good. But we need to be cautious, [and] we need to be humble.”
Coronavirus-related hospitalizations continue to decline; in the last seven days, the number of COVID-19 patients in Kentucky hospitals has dropped 12%. Fewer than half of the state’s 96 acute care hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages. On Monday, 687 people with the virus were hospitalized, 196 were in an intensive care unit and 121 were on a ventilator.
Though Kentucky is no longer gripped by severe levels of community spread and overwhelmingly high patient volumes, the state continues to see ripple effects from the summer surge. On Monday, Kentucky surpassed 10,000 COVID-19 deaths to a total of 10,019 — another grim milestone.
“It is nothing short of tragic,” Beshear said, adding that the virus in 2020 and so far this year is the third-highest leading cause of death among Kentuckians.
Over the weekend, 10,388 vaccine doses were administered statewide. Roughly 58% of the total state population is at least partially vaccinated, and 345,887 people have been both fully vaccinated and received a booster dose, according to the Kentucky Department for Public Health.
