Kentucky won’t fully reopen until June at current rate of COVID-19 vaccination

Gov. Andy Beshear announced 609 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Tuesday as the pace of vaccinations continues to slow in the state.

He also announced 13 COVID-19 deaths — six from March, one from February, three from January, two from December and one from November. The state’s death toll from the virus is 6,360.

“As our case numbers seem to be plateauing, it’s more important than ever for us to make sure our vaccination numbers are rising consistently,” Beshear said in a news release. The number of new cases last week was up 19 percent over the previous week but remained under 5,000, where the number has hovered since mid-March.

The vaccination rate has been shrinking over the past four weeks, not rising. The state reported its highest number of people vaccinated in a week — 172,018 — between March 16 and March 22 and the totals have fallen since. Between April 13 and April 19, 106,733 people were vaccinated.

A total of 1,672,364 Kentuckians have gotten at least their first dose of the vaccine, which makes up 37.4 percent of the population of Kentucky. In the month of April, the state has vaccinated around 16,836 people a day. At that pace, Kentucky won’t hit Beshear’s goal of 2.5 million Kentuckians vaccinated until June 8.

As the number of new cases seems to have plateaued, so have the number of people in the hospital and ICU. On Tuesday, Beshear announced there are 419 people in the hospital with COVID-19, of whom 121 are in intensive care.

So far in the month of April, 884 Kentuckians have been hospitalized with the virus, putting the state on track to have a similar number of hospitalizations to August 2020.

The hospitalization numbers are down significantly from a peak of 3,546 Kentuckians in the month of December, when the state began a concerted effort to vaccinate people who are most at risk of complications from the virus.