Beshear pushes boosters to help avoid a Thanksgiving surge in COVID cases
As COVID-19 metrics tick up in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear on Thursday again urged fully-vaccinated Kentuckians to get their COVID-19 vaccine booster ahead of Thanksgiving in order to help avoid another post-holiday surge.
“Do I think we will see a surge? I think it is certainly possible, maybe even likely, but it is entirely avoidable,” Beshear said in a news conference. “We have more tools approaching Thanksgiving than ever before, and more people eligible,” he said of the availability of vaccines to children as young as 5-years-old and booster shots to all adults. “The number one thing we can do to stop that plateau, stop that uptick: get your vaccine [or] get boosted.”
Kentucky in the last two weeks has logged a slight increase in coronavirus cases and the statewide positivity rate. The rate of people testing positive lurched to 6.24% on Wednesday — the highest in almost a month — up from 5.73% on Tuesday, before settling at 6.18% on Thursday. And the tally of new cases last week — 9,506 — was higher last week than the previous two weeks, which hasn’t happened in roughly two months.
Hospitalizations are also up. On Thursday, 750 were hospitalized with COVID-19, up from 695 a week ago. The governor’s office announced another 1,855 cases on Thursday and 40 deaths. Statewide, 195 people are in an intensive care unit with COVID-19, and 100 are on a ventilator.
“The threat is the greatest when our numbers look like they are plateaued if not ticking up a little bit,” Beshear said, citing these trends as his reason for signing an executive order on Wednesday giving any adult who lives and works in the state access a booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The governor is urging people who received their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at least six months ago, or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two months ago, to sign up for a third dose.
More fully-vaccinated people, especially those who received their shot six or more months ago, are testing positive and requiring hospitalization, further suggesting that immunity from the vaccine wanes over time, Beshear said.
From March 1 to Nov. 17, 83.6% of the 353,768 new positive cases were among unvaccinated or partially vaccinated Kentuckians, as were 83.6% of the 10,957 people hospitalized and 84.4% of the 4,468 people who died of coronavirus.
Those percentages are notably lower than two months ago; between March 1 and September 22, 87% of new cases, 92% of people hospitalized with the virus and 85% of deaths were among the unvaccinated.
“Waning immunity is real,” Beshear said. “Now is our chance to lift our immunity back up.”
Roughly 59% of the state population is at least partially vaccinated, and 446,698 people have received a booster. Just over 23,100 children ages 5 to 11 have received their first dose, he said.
This story was originally published November 18, 2021 at 5:34 PM.
