April 9, 2020: Update on COVID-19

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PLEASE NOTE: This information was accurate as of press time, but the numbers listed are not current and additional actions have been taken since this was written. Please visit our Facebook page for COVID-19 updates as news breaks.

Taylor County’s second confirmed COVID-19 patient, a female who had been hospitalized for treatment, was released from isolation this week, according to data from the Lake Cumberland District Health Department.

A public information briefing released Tuesday night also indicated that, of the county’s three COVID-19 patients, none were hospitalized at press time.

The third case was announced by Ronnie Dooley, director of Taylor County Emergency Management, last Friday.

That patient is a male and was said to be isolated in his home. No further details on the subject have been made public.

Grocery Shopping

Dooley announced Monday morning that Taylor County Judge-Executive Barry Smith had signed a new executive order, effective immediately, limiting the number of people who can shop for a family or any other kind of group to one.

Exceptions to the order allow a parent to bring minors who would otherwise be left unattended and allows elderly or disabled individuals to bring one person with them for assistance if they are unable to shop on their own.

The mandate also requires all essential retail stores to develop and enforce policies that ensure at least six feet of social distancing is maintained, adding additional weight to a policy Gov. Andy Beshear has had in place for over a month.

“COVID-19 has invaded our community, thus prompting this executive order,” Dooley wrote. “People are strongly encouraged not to be out unless absolutely necessary.”

Hydroxychloroquine

President Donald Trump heavily advocated for a drug called hydroxychloroquine during a press briefing Saturday, going against the guidance of his own expert on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has not endorsed taking the drug for COVID-19.

Hydroxychloroquine rose to prominence as a supposed “cure” for COVID-19 after a guest on a Fox News show told viewers that France had found a drug with a “100% cure rate” for the global pandemic.

The small study which this person referenced as “proof” of the drug’s ability to cure COVID-19 has been denounced by medical professionals across the globe for not just being conducted incorrectly — some patients were given an additional antibiotic, and the demographic makeup of each group was different — but also for reporting its findings in a dishonest way.

In the study, a doctor divided 42 of his patients into two groups of 21.

One group would receive hydroxychloroquine, the other would not.

Of the 21 patients who received the drug, one died and three were transferred out of his care into an intensive care unit (ICU), meaning almost 20% of the patients he treated with hydroxychloroquine actually got worse.

The outcomes of those four patients were not reported in the results because the doctor did not report results for any patient that was no longer under his care. The outcomes of two more patients who took the drug were also not reported, as one patient decided to stop taking it due to nausea and another left the hospital.

While a 72-80% “cure rate” may still sound enticing, disreputable sources who claim the drug is a cure for COVID-19 also omit the fact that all of the doctor’s patients who did not take the drug recovered and none were transferred out of his care to an ICU.

Dr. Didier Raoult, the French doctor who is the corresponding author for the study, has refused to comment on the criticism, but the journal in which the study was published has sided with the critics and issued a statement saying that, upon review, the study did not meet their standards.

In response to the increased attention around hydroxychloroquine, the Kentucky Board of Pharmacy has issued new guidelines to prevent hoarding.

Pharmacists in the Commonwealth have been instructed to only fill prescriptions for people who have a written diagnosis from their prescribing doctor indicating they have a condition that they need the drug to treat.

Anyone who was prescribed hydroxychloroquine after March 25 will be given only 10 days’ worth at a time, and refills are prohibited for any patient who does not have a new prescription order and a written diagnosis saying they need to continue using the drug.

Other News

At press time, the Lake Cumberland Health District has reached 53 positive and presumptive positive cases in total, with one in Clinton County, one in Cumberland County, one in Green County, three in Taylor County, four in Russell County, four in Wayne County, five in McCreary County, six in Adair County and 28 in Pulaski County, where several of the first cases occurred after someone with COVID-19 attended a church service.

Casey County is the only neighboring county — and the only county in the district — to have zero confirmed cases as of press time.

There have been a total of two deaths in the district, a man in Pulaski County and an elderly woman in Adair County, who was a resident at Summit Manor Rehab and Wellness Center.

The facility at Summit Manor is currently working with healthcare officials to ensure the wellbeing of their patients.

“Today was a very difficult day as we had to report the second death from the virus in our district, an Adair County resident,” said Amy Tomlinson, LCDHD’s preparedness director, who rarely offers comments when sending out the district’s public information briefings. “Please keep those affected by this illness in your thoughts and prayers.”

The state as a whole has 1,149 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and has had 65 deaths as a result of the disease at press time.

When the CKNJ went to press last week, the state had about half as many confirmed cases, at 564, and about a quarter as many deaths, with the count at just 18.

“It doesn’t matter what other states are doing,” Beshear said in his daily COVID-19 briefing Tuesday night. “What we are doing is working. What we are doing is flattening the curve.”

As the number of confirmed cases and the death toll continue to climb higher in the coming weeks, it is important to note that the projected number of deaths in Kentucky before the pandemic ends relies on communities complying with the governor’s stay-at-home order as strictly as possible for a three-month period of time.

With three months of stay-at-home measures in place, but with poor compliance, the death count is projected to reach somewhere around 13,000 Kentuckians.

With strict compliance, that number is 2,000.

Those numbers are contested, with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation out of the University of Washington suggesting Kentucky’s death count could peak at 821 people, but Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky’s public health commissioner, said that figure was too optimistic based on other sources of data he has access to.

Regardless, Beshear urged Kentuckians in his Tuesday night address to take responsibility for not just their own health but for the health of those around them, too.

“It’s crunch time, and you’ve done good work to date,” he said, “but’s important to do even better.”