COVID-19 hospitalizations in Kentucky have increased every day for the past 42 days, Governor Andy Beshear said Thursday, adding that if it were in his authority, which was recently reduced by a state Supreme Court decision, he would order a new indoor mask mandate in place.
Over the past six weeks, Kentuckians hospitalized increased from 239 on July 14 to 2,074 on Wednesday.
The current number is the highest of the entire pandemic, which arrived in Kentucky early last year. The previous high was 1,817 on Dec. 17.
Intensive care units are also increasingly occupied. On July 14 there were 60 people in the state in an ICU due to COVID-19 and on Wednesday there were 549. On JUly 14, there were 25 people in the state on ventilators and now there are 338.
There were 65 COVID-related deaths reported in Kentucky on Wednesday.
The state is also seeing a record positivity rate since has had adequate testing supplies. The current positivity rate is 13.16%, up from 3.81% on July 14, and from 1.79% on June 24 which was the lowest of the pandemic.
“My point with all of these numbers is that we are in uncharted territory. We have been fighting this virus for almost 18 months, but we have never been here before,” said Beshear. “As horrible as last year’s surge was, we were never in the position where doctors worried they’d need to choose between treating a patient who can’t breathe because of COVID or treating a patient who is bleeding out from a car accident. But that is the strain that our hospitals are under now.”
There were 4,849 positive COVID-19 cases in Kentucky on Wednesday.
Northern Kentucky counties accounted for 185 of the new positive cases.
“It is exhausting to see more and more patients come in who are struggling,” said Courtney Fales, a registered nurse at St. Elizabeth Healthcare. “We have to work twice as hard. It takes more staff, it takes more bodies to keep these patients stable. It just makes me really want people to get vaccinated because the ones that I see struggling right now are the ones who have not gotten the vaccine.”
“Hospitals are being filled all over the country and I would say most of our patients right now are unvaccinated folks,” said Sean Kathman, a registered nurse at St. Elizabeth Healthcare. “Patients who we have had, who have been vaccinated, they have been admitted for maybe a day just for observation and have been discharged in a day or two – not nearly as sick as the folks who are unvaccinated. Vaccinations are our number one priority right now.”
Beshear is no longer able to issue executive orders related to masking and other mitigation efforts as before following Republicans’ successful court challenges.
“The decision on broader masking, on masking throughout the commonwealth, is now one that’s going to be left to the legislature. But yesterday, having the third highest number of cases we’ve ever had and having 65 people die, that would’ve been the trigger for me,” Beshear said. “If it was in my authority to put in a masking order for indoors across the state, every other time we’ve been this high, we’ve done that, and it’s worked. It has decreased the number of cases. I can’t do that now, and I get that, and I’ll provide all of the information I can to the General Assembly. Hopefully they will make the best decision they can. But I am begging you out there, put on that mask. We desperately need for you to do it again.”
From March 1 to Aug. 18, 2021, 85.3% of COVID-19 cases, 90.3% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 87.4% of COVID-19 deaths were among unvaccinated or partially vaccinated Kentuckians, Beshear said.
As of today, 2,488,328 Kentuckians have received at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine including 6,674 who have been vaccinated over the past 24 hours.
-Michael Monks, editor & publisher
Photo: COVID-19 testing site in Covington (Michael Monks/RCN)
