Category: Coronavirus

Kentucky’s Covid-19 Epidemic Still Expanding Rapidly

The intervening Fourth of July Holiday and another bump in the road about how cases were counted made the number of new cases reported less indictive of the actual state of Kentucky’s epidemic expansion. The July 4th report of Test Positivity of 15.75% is the highest since mid-February with a string of uninterrupted increases since April 11. Similarly, the Overall Statewide Incidence Rate is also at a new peak of 30.8 new cases per 100K population. Both these previously reliable indicators continue to rise at an exponential rate.

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Covid-19 Epidemic Still Expanding in KY With Hospital Utilization Increasing.

New reported weekly cases of Covid-19 continue to increase sharply. Yesterday’s new case count of 13,947 is the highest yet since the new less-aggressive case reporting system was put into place in early March and is nearly double the number of two weeks before.  This much lower than the January Omicron peak of some 80,000 weekly or the Delta peak last fall of 30,000.  However, the number of new cases reported currently is undoubtedly a considerable undercount due to changes in case identification and reporting protocols.

New weekly cases Covid-19 in KY reported 6-13-22. Assume an undercount.
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Spring Surge of Covid-19 in Kentucky Expanding Exponentially

Fourteen weeks ago Kentucky’s Department of Public Health switched from daily Covid-19 updates to weekly reports, including to the CDC. Additional changes were made as to what categories of cases and tests would be reportable. These changes were made in early March, 2022 when the Commonwealth was largely recovered from the Omicron wave that peaked in late January but had not yet descended below the levels of cases, hospitalizations, or deaths occurring in the interval between the Delta and Omicron variants in early November. These three weekly metrics continued to fall until early last April when it has become clear that Coronavirus infections in Kentucky were on the rise again, indeed, in an exponential fashion. 

Spring Surge of 2022:
Beginning in early to mid-April, the Test Positivity Rate (TPR) and Overall Incidence Rate per 100K Population (OIR) began to rise progressively thus enabling the subsequent surge of new cases beginning in early May that has continued through the last report of June 6th. Last week’s TPR is higher than that of the previous 13 weeks, as is the OIR. The weekly new case count is higher than any of the previous 12 weeks. Since the nadirs of these three metrics of disease activity, all three have been doubling exponentially every three weeks.

TPR correlated closely with cases the entirety of the KY epidemic.
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Covid-19 Still Spreading In KY, But The Worst Outcomes Not So Much.

Presence of holiday weekend with big-time concerts and decreasing reporting protocols make forecasting iffy.

On May 31, the staff of the Kentucky Department of Public Health gave an online update to practitioners. Since there are no longer any weekly, let alone daily updates from the Governor’s Office, this well-done authoritative session, combined with the published weekly online updates from the KYDPH are now my best sources of information about Kentucky’s Covid-19 epidemic. Following are some of the highpoints
from Tuesday’s presentations.

Cases: The 7-Day total of new cases ending May 30 was 7140, the first decrease since the incremental current surge began 5 weeks before. I am not sure what to make of this as previous long holiday weekends were often followed by a period of lower testing and reporting. The number of PCR tests performed last week was essentially the same as the week before. The bulk of new cases reported has increasingly come from this subset of PCR tests reported electronically to the state. For the past 5 weeks, more than 60% of new cases presented to us and to the CDC came from PCR tests. Last week, the figure was 78%. This increasing representation from reported positive PCR tests is compatible with the large and increasing number of antigen office or self-tests that are not reported one way or the other to anyone.

I assume that at least some of the reported PCR tests originate from hospitals. In recent weeks, Kentucky hospitals are no longer required to report “suspected” cases of Covid-19, presumably to cull out individuals who come to a hospital for non-Covid reasons and are found to be positive. The actual number of new cases is surely several multiples of what is reported above. While it would be nice to be sure that a Derby wave of cases is passing, it remains to be seen what happens following the Memorial Day holiday with its large-scale music festivals and other public activities.

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