Sixty of Kentucky’s 96 hospitals are at a critical staffing shortage and additional National Guard troops are deploying to help some of those facilities.
Governor Andy Beshear said during his Thursday morning briefing that the number of COVID patients in the ICU and on a ventilator are also at all-time highs.
National Guard troops are already at four hospitals and over 300 additional soldiers will deploy Monday to 21 hospitals—including ones in Paducah and Bowling Green.
The governor says the best way to help your local hospital is by getting vaccinated and by masking when you are indoors away from home to help keep yourself and others from becoming ill enough with the virus to require a hospital bed.
Additional nursing students from across Kentucky are also going to assist understaffed hospitals where they are needed.
The 15-year-old boy who died from COVID in Shelby County was Kentucky’s second school-aged child to die from the virus during the pandemic.