Beshear says he expects the pandemic will ease by mid-March in Ky.; right now, our infection rate remains fifth among the states

Kentucky Dept. for Public Health graph, adapted by Kentucky Health News; for a larger version, click on it.

By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News

Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that Kentuckians can expect changes in his pandemic recommendations in mid-March, because he expects the state will move into a lower level of transmission by March 14.

"If these trends continue, we believe Kentucky will move out of the red and into the orange or even the yellow conservatively by March the 14th. That's when we will be in a much better place as long as we continue to see these declines and the rates of decline," Beshear said at his weekly Covid-19 press conference. "With that in mind, our goal will be to provide new guidance as of that date." 

The red zone on the state infection map is for counties with more than 25 daily cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days and is considered a high level of transmission. The orange zone is for counties with 10 to 25 cases, a substantial level of transmission; the yellow zone is for counties with one to 10 cases, a moderate level. The green zone is for counties with less than one daily case per 100,000 residents and is a low level of transmission. 

Beshear said the March 14 projection was made by through Health Commissioner Steven Stack's analysis of recent data. 

Stack said he looks forward to updating the guidance in mid-March, but cautioned that we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that "has surprised us and thrown curveballs multiple times over the last two years." 

He added, "It's really, really imperative that we continue to take reasonable and responsible steps to try to minimize the risk. . . so that once we have these gains, we can keep the gains and go on with our lives, much more like we used to know them." 

Beshear said some changes would likely include recommendations around masking for the general public and people in state government, and switching to a three-color system for transmission rates. 

From Saturday to Monday, the state reported 7,932 new coronavirus cases, bringing the seven-day rolling average to 4,896 cases, the first time under 5,000 since Jan. 4. But a high share, 30.6%, were in people 18 and younger. 

Kentucky reported 35,961 new cases in the Monday-to-Sunday reporting week ended Feb. 13, down for the third week in a row, "The trajectory is exactly what we want to see," Beshear said, while noting that it was still the sixth highest weekly case number of the pandemic.

The seven-day infection rate is 79.74 daily cases per 100,000 residents. Four counties remain above 200: Wolfe, 239.5; Lee, 233.5; Perry, 210.8; and Owsley, 207.1. On the other end of the spectrum, four counties are now out of the red zone on the state infection map for counties with fewer than 25 cases per 100,000: Kenton, 23.2; Todd, 20.9; Hickman, 19.6; and Carlisle, 18.

Kentucky continues to have one of the highest infection rates in the nation, as most other states are seeing greater declines. The New York Times, using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, ranks Kentucky's infection rate fifth among states, even with a 63% decline in cases in the last 14 days. That is slightly less than the national decline of 67%.

The share of Kentuckians testing positive for Covid-19 in the past seven days dropped again, to 17.93%. This rate hit a high of 33.1% Jan. 23. 

Beshear said all pandemic hospital numbers continue to decline and the state has fewer National Guard helping hospitals and other health-care facilities. He said 318 Guard members are currently deployed. 

Kentucky hospitals reported 1,750 patients with Covid-19 Monday, 322 of them in intensive care and 162 on mechanical ventilation. The total hospital-case number was 17.6% less than a week earlier.

Seven of the state's 10 hospital regions are using at least 80% of their intensive-care beds, with three of over 90%. Both figures are the lowest in several weeks.

Stack strongly urged women who are pregnant to get vaccinated because Covid-19 increases the risk for "bad outcomes, hospitalizations, mechanical ventilation and even death" in women who are pregnant, compared to the same-aged women who are not pregnant. He then went over several studies that show there is no evidence of adverse maternal or fetal effects from taking the Covid-19 vaccine. 

"I want to emphasize that vaccination helps to mitigate or almost entirely prevent most of those bad outcomes so we can take something that is thankfully an uncommon bad outcome and make it almost a non existent outcome, which is what we want to do," Stack said.

He later added, "There is absolutely no evidence that the vaccines cause any harm to fertility or any other complications related to pregnancy." 

Since Saturday, the state reported 116 more Covid-19 deaths, bringing the pandemic death toll in Kentucky to 13,416. Five of the deaths were in people between the ages of 18 and 48.