‘Kentucky is now in a surge from omicron.’ State’s positivity rate, case numbers soar.
Confirming that Kentucky is in a fourth COVID-19 surge, the statewide positivity rate jumped to a record 14.46% on Wednesday, up from 12.61% Tuesday.
“Folks, it’s clear Kentucky is now in a surge from omicron,” Gov. Andy Beshear tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “This is the most contagious variant we’ve seen.”
The second-highest positivity rate since testing for the virus became widely available occurred in the autumn surge, which was driven by the delta variant: on September 8, the state logged a 14.16% positivity rate.
The state Department for Public Health also confirmed 5,530 new cases and 21 deaths on Wednesday. At least 1,434 people are hospitalized with coronavirus — an increase of 105 people from Tuesday. Since Monday, 314 people have been admitted to hospitals across the commonwealth with the virus. The numbers of people in intensive care units and relying on ventilators to breathe are also up: 369 were in an ICU (up 27 in the last day), and 220 are on a ventilator (an increase of 17 people).
On Tuesday, Kentucky reported 4,297 new cases — the highest in at least two months — and a positivity rate of 12.61%, up from 11.8% on Monday, and 9.61% a week ago. Not only are more people getting tested in Kentucky — Wild Health, one of the largest testing contractors in the state, reported a 10% increase in demand in a matter of days — more people are becoming infected. Lexington, for instance, reported its highest single day case count on Tuesday — 494, up from the previous record more than a year ago, 451. In Louisville, the positivity rate has reached a record 20%.
Nationwide, the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases surpassed 280,000 this week — another record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University’s tracker. Omicron is indeed driving that acceleration both nationally and in Kentucky, which has clocked a seven-fold increase in projected omicron cases over the last three weeks.
Omicron counted for just over 10% of cases in a portion of the South that includes Kentucky during the week of December 5-11, while 90% were delta, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The following week, December 12-18, the majority of new cases were again delta, not omicron (63.4% compared to 36%) in the region that includes Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina.
But the week of December 19-25, omicron’s prevalence more than doubled.
The week of Christmas, 78.3% of new cases were estimated to be omicron, while 21.5% were delta. That’s considerably higher than the national share of omicron cases last week (nearly 60%) compared with delta (41%).
Hospitalizations from COVID-19 have not begun to surge as precipitously yet in Kentucky the way they have in places like Washington, D.C., New York, New Jersey and Maryland. But all signs point in that direction; though cases have just begun to steeply climb in recent days, the positivity rate, a leading indicator of how spread is in a community, has been on the rise for most of this month, picking up steam in the last 10 days. A spike in hospitalizations has historically followed a surge in positivity rate and new infections.
This story was originally published December 29, 2021 at 5:31 PM.
