Bluegrass Times

Kentucky finds itself at 323 deaths per million making it 11th in the country when it comes to COVID-related deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

 The project found that when it comes to COVID-19 data, people have been looking at decontextualized data, which is causing hysteria like children staying out of school and businesses shutting down. 

 Kentucky’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state has stayed between 100 people per million in hospitals to nearly 150 per million, which isn’t anywhere near increased case numbers. 

 “Kentucky is a marvel of flatness, with a death rate less than 1/4 that of Massachusetts, and 1/6th that of NY,” the commentary states ”Kentucky has literally never even had a peak of deaths, and even now has a lower daily death rate than Massachusetts. Hospitalizations have stayed between 100 and 150/million, looking now like they may creep towards 200. At the same time, Kentucky enjoys the 12th best unemployment at 5.6%.”

 Since Sept. 15, there has been a significant increase in testing for COVID-19 at 55 percent, which has also led to an increase in positive cases, leading many to assume the country is heading into a third wave of infections and deaths.

 Emily Burns with The Pragmatist writes that it’s important to put the new numbers into context so that people will make wise decisions regarding what to do about the pandemic. She writes that in May, cases were tracked at nearly the same as hospitalizations. She notes that deaths and hospitalizations are more reliable data when tracking than cases are.

With COVID-19 testing up 70 percent since the second wave, Burns points out that the surge in testing is responsible for the increased number of new cases seen across the nation, not an increased infection rate many have been led to believe.