Health

Gov. Andy Beshear said Ernest and Young can provide some 300 employees to resolve outstanding claims quickly.

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.

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?"

The governor said the state continues to be on a manageable plateau when it comes to new cases, and the state has plenty of hospital beds and intensive care unit beds available, noting that  hospital occupancy is around 50 percent and its intensive-care capacity is around 70 percent.