Today has been difficult. We report one new death, a nursing home resident from Adair County. This brings our total deaths to twenty. Our mortality rate at 10.15% is high compared to national and state averages. We also announce four new COVID-19 cases, one 83-year-old female from Adair, a nursing home resident; one 52-year-old female from Casey; and, two Pulaski residents, a 25-year-old male and a 26-year-old female.

We did release two from isolation (recovered). This means 156 people or 79% of our total cumulative positive cases have recovered.

The Lake Cumberland area has experienced 197 Cumulative Confirmed Cases and there have been 7,083 Confirmed COVID-19 cases across 113 Kentucky Counties as of 05/13/20 (this includes 7,080 statewide plus 3 recently reported cases in Lake Cumberland not in the Governor’s daily report). Regardless of the confirmed case count for any Lake Cumberland County, we believe COVID-19 to be widespread.  LCDHD is working to identify and contact all those with whom any positive case may have come into close contact.

Today we conducted our weekly media/public update and broadcast it live via our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/c/LCDHDPublicHealth. We are happy to report that several new community partners are coming on as COVID-19 testing locations, and several counties have either already conducted, are in the process of conducting, or are planning on conducting drive-through testing sites. We continue to encourage all local partners who are providing COVID-19 testing to register on the kycovid19.ky.gov webpage so the public can have a consistent location to find testing site information.

We continue to review the Governor’s business reopening guidance and to field questions from local businesses regarding such.