FRANKFORT, Ky. — A nine-month-old child is the first juvenile death tied to COVID-19 in the state of Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear announced on Wednesday. The child was in Hopkins County, roughly 150 miles southwest of Louisville.
Though the leading cause of the child's death is not COVID-19, the disease was a contributing factor, he said.
Despite the child's death, Beshear said there have not been any additional cases of children presenting with the pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome seen earlier in May.
As the summer months begin, Steven Stack, department of public health commissioner in Kentucky, warned that there is still no evidence that warmer weather and the incoming humidity will have any effect on the coronavirus or its infection rate. He urged people to continue abiding by rules of social distancing, mask-wearing and persistent hand-washing to continue to keep the virus at bay in the Commonwealth.
So far, according to Beshear and Stack, recent protests in major cities throughout Kentucky have not created a spike in COVID-19 cases, but it may still be too soon to tell for certain. Beshear added that, so far, the state's admissions to ICUs for COVID-19 are the lowest they've been "in a long time."
"In general, it's not a shortcut to say 'I'm good' because the false positive rate is still high enough that you're as likely to be wrong as you are to be right," said Stack.
WATCH: Governor Andy Beshear's news conference on COVID-19 in the Commonwealth:
