The health department is asking local residents to pay attention to their surroundings, especially in settings with several people, in the event they need to later help identify people with whom they had contact.
The fatalities included a 30-year-old woman from Fayette County, who appears to have been the youngest COVID-19 death in the state. Others were an 84-year-old woman from Fayette County, an 81-year-old man from Franklin County and a 93-year-old man from Shelby County.
The Christian County Health Department reported the county’s fourth death related to COVID-19 and a surge in coronavirus cases, from 182 to 225 in one day, on Thursday. Some of the cases involved construction workers at the Oak Grove facility.
Gov. Andy Beshear announced 280 new cases, bringing the state's total to 14,617. That pushed the seven-day rolling average to 211, from 204 the day before.
As everything in Kentucky opens at some capacity on Monday, Beshear also urged Kentuckians to keep 6 feet of social distance and decrease their daily activities by half — things he said they will need to do until a vaccine is readily available.
eshear recently said that his decisions about the virus would be guided more by hospital data than new cases. The state's daily report said 376 Kentuckians were hospitalized for COVID-19 and 70 of them are in intensive care. Those figures have been increasing since the 339 and 64 reported Friday.
"... what kind of a human being says, when told point-blank that the person with whom he's in conversation knows people who have died or become gravely ill, responds that such people must have had underlying conditions? What's his point? That they deserved to die?"
