FRANKFORT, Ky. — Gov. Andy Beshear scheduled his routine COVID-19 update for Monday, May 3 at 4 p.m.
As of Monday afternoon, roughly 650,000 Kentuckians still needed to receive their first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine in order to reach the governor's goal of 2.5 million residents inoculated. Beshear set the number as a rough milestone at which his administration would begin major rollbacks on the state's pandemic-related public health restrictions.
Beshear also said cases of COVID-19 across the state continued to remain at a plateau Monday afternoon, with 313 new cases reported and a 3.45% test-positivity rate statewide.
Along with health commissioner Dr. Steven Stack, Beshear elaborated on the state's new COVID-19 vaccination dashboard, which uses federal data to track vaccination rates at the county level.
"We're going to start showing on our daily report the top five counties with the highest vaccination rates, as well as our bottom five counties by vaccination rates," Beshear said. "To our top five counties: Good job. Keep it up. There is still so much more to do. To our bottom five counties: Let's work even harder because we want everybody to be protected."
With the launch of the dashboard, the state's vaccination data will pull from federal reporting system. As a result, there could be discrepancies between Kentucky's own data and what is pulled to the dashboard, Stack said.
Watch the briefing in the viewer below:
