LOUISVILLE, Ky. — COVID-19 cases are down for the fourth week in a row.
Gov. Andy Beshear said as cases continue to fall he's hopeful for the near future and will update guidance March 14.
"This is really good news. We are headed in the right direction. It looks like we may be able to have a really good spring, and summer," he said.
Beshear said the number of people in the hospital or the intensive care units are declining. "Deaths are still fairly high, but we hope deaths will follow the rest of the trends shortly," said Beshear.
Health officials say the positivity rate has fallen to 12.74%. Beshear said this is slightly below the positivity rate in the Delta surge.
Beshear then cautioned schools against dropping mask mandates too early.
"We're still above 12% positivity rate. We're still 25,000+ cases in a week. Pretty much, anywhere in school, elementary to high school, we are less than half of the students who would be there, vaccinated," said Beshear.
Beshear said the vaccination pace has fallen. However, he did mention that the number of people getting vaccinated, whether for the first time or the second shot, never fell to zero.
He said to be patient; he believes Kentucky will be in a good place in a couple of weeks just so long as another variant doesn't appear.
Overall, Kentucky has confirmed 1,264,329 cases and 13,647 deaths since the pandemic began more than a year ago.
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