Beshear and Louisville health experts generally agree on plan, though Ky. hasn't met benchmarks he set, following the feds-HEALTHYLIVE

As news develops about the coronavirus and its covid-19 disease, this item will be updated. Official state guidance is at kycovid19.ky.gov.

Bloomberg News chart shows positive tests in
red and pink, and negative tests in grays. Flu-
like illness is shown in bars across the bottom.
Gray rectangle indicates the last two weeks.

Kentucky is moving forward with reopening the economy, even though it has not met the benchmarks that Gov. Andy Beshear laid out about three weeks ago, Joe Sonka reports for the Louisville Courier Journal, weaving together several threads pursued by Kentucky Health News and the Lexington Herald-Leader in the last two weeks and providing more research and analysis.

He notes, "Covid-19 cases are not declining, testing capacity still lags behind the White House's recommendation and 500 new workers to conduct contact tracing are possibly weeks away from starting." Sonka digs into each of these measures in detail, and includes two studies that question whether Kentucky is jumping the gun, a Bloomberg analysis and a recent study by the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health & Wellness and the University of Louisville.

The study concludes that if Louisville was able to "practice stronger social-distancing strategies, we could safely open in early June. Therefore, taking new and more effective measures can make a manageable early-June opening more likely." It said "decreasing the current social-distancing measures without efforts in regard to testing, isolating, and contact tracing can move us to an unstable status which can be catastrophic."

Dr. Paul McKinney, director of U of L's Center for Health Hazards Preparedness and co-author of the study, told Sonka that Beshear’s reopening plan likely isn’t perfect, "but it's a very reasonable plan, I think, to do it in steps. . . . The good thing about the staged plan is that if you find we're going too fast, you put the brakes on there. Rather than saying 'We're closing everything down again,' no, 'We're just stopping where we are and not moving any further'."

Sonka notes what Beshear said at his Monday briefing: "What really led us to believe that we can go ahead and start the reopening is the gradualness of it."

In other covid-19 news Thursday:

• One of President Trump's personal valets has tested positive for the coronavirus, CNN reports, adding that two people familiar with the situation told CNN the president, vice-president and senior staffers who regularly interact with them are still being tested weekly. 
• John Cheves reports for the Herald-Leader about the coronavirus outbreak at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington where local officials have said the "prison administrators have been unresponsive to questions" from both the mayor's office and the local health department and inmates tell him they are "sitting ducks."
• Bill Estep of the Herald-Leader reports concerns that Kentuckians will flock to Tennessee restaurants along the Kentucky border, as they did earlier in the pandemic. "I know it's going to increase our exposure," said Bell County Judge-Executive Albey Brock. Tennessee's restaurants were allowed to open April 27; Kentucky's aren't expected to open until June.
• Dr. John Barton, a leading authority on high-risk obstetrics at Baptist Health in Lexington, told John Clay of the Herald-Leader that there is still much to learn about the effects of covid-19 and pregnancy, and his best advice is to use common sense. 
• UPS is giving $100,000 to the University of Louisville to fund promising research into blocking the coronavirus from infecting human cells. Mike Stunson of the Herald-Leader wrote about this research, which involves an aptamer, a synthetic DNA and originally developed as a cancer treatment, on April 22.
• Kentucky Health News has republished a column by Becky Barnes, editor of The Cynthiana Democrat, "I will wear a mask . . . for you." Barnes has worked at the paper for 44 years and in early March, when Harrison County had Kentucky's first case of covid-19, she published a special edition about it, giving information that dispelled rumors.
• Cellphone data show that more Americans appear to be staying home, The Washington Post reports that in an article that includes an interactive map that shows the share of time spent at home for every county in the nation, except a few with too few mobile devices in monitored by SafeGraph.
• Every day, kycovid19.ky.gov updates its report on long-term-care and other congregate facilities. It shows the facilities, the numbers of residents and staff with positive coronavirus test results in each facility, and the numbers of deaths in each facility. 
• As of May 6, five facilities had 10 or more resident deaths from the virus: Rosedale Green in Kenton County, with 20 deaths, and 63 residents and 22 staff with positive tests; Ridgewood Terrace Nursing Home in Hopkins County, with 19 deaths and 61 residents and 21 staff testing positive; Mills Health and Rehab in Graves County, 16 deaths and 65 residents and 31 positive staff; Treyton Oak Towers in Louisville, 15 deaths, 35 positive residents and 15 positive staff; and Jackson Manor in Annville, with 10 deaths, 40 positive residents and 20 positive staff. WKYT-TV reports there are now 12 deaths at Jackson Manor, owned by Signature HealthCare, the state's largest nursing-home operator. It also has Summit Manor in Columbia, which has had nine resident deaths and the only two staff deaths in the state, and 65 positive residents and 17 positive staff.
• The Cooperative Extension Service is providing guidelines to farmers to help them safely welcome immigrants with H-2A work visas back to their farms in the midst of the pandemic. "Producers know that if even one person in their operation contracts the virus, it could shutter their entire enterprise for at least two weeks," Katie Pratt reports for the University of Kentucky, noting that  about 780 Kentucky producers hired more than 8,300 H 2-A workers in 2019.  “The packets included covid-19 information and guidance, best health practices and producer guidelines, all translated into Spanish,” Beau Neal, agriculture and natural resources extension agent from Daviess County, told Pratt. “I also included some guidelines for the employers to maintain a healthy workplace environment for all H-2A employees. Doing this helps those employees and their coworkers stay safe and healthy, and to be on the same page as the producer in developing a plan moving forward to adhere to proper health guidelines in their work environment."

from KENTUCKY HEALTH NEWS https://ift.tt/3ftG3h1

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