Covid-19 updates

As news develops about the coronavirus and its covid-19 disease, this item may be updated. Official state guidance is at kycovid19.ky.gov.

• A third inmate with covid-19 has died at Green River Correctional Complex in Central City; the inmate tested positive for the coronavirus on April 28 and was cared for by prison staff, John Cheves reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader.  Inmate Jeffrey Rowland told Cheves Monday in a phone interview, “It’s just insane in here. You’ve got six guys who have tested positive living in my dorm, and they’re exposing ... everyone else.” He said contract kitchen workers for Aramark “are not wearing masks like they’re supposed to. The [corrections] officers wear them when they want to.” 
• Cabinet Secretary J. Michael Brown said Monday that inmates are being separated depending on whether they have tested positive or not for the virus, whether they have been exposed to it, and if they are medically vulnerable to it.
• Bill Estep of the Herald-Leader tells the story of Michelle Rose Thompson, 58, of Columbia, who volunteered to work on the covid-19 ward at the Summit Manor nursing home in Adair County, a Signature HealthCare facility and died April 30. She was the second employee in at the home, and the second in Kentucky, to die of covid-19, The other employee was Pamela L. Hughes, who died April 13. 
• The latest Axios poll found that most Democrats believe the covid-19 death toll is higher than it is, while most Republicans think it is lower, and found that people who rely on Fox News are most likely to believe it is lower than reported. "This may be the most jarring evidence to date about just how deeply partisanship has infected our collective ability to trust institutional sources and agree on science and facts," Axios says. "Trust in government is abstract, but death counts are real."
• Click here to watch a virtual panel discussion, "Outside the Margins: Covid-19, Health Inequities and the Black Community" that examined the broad economic and health impacts of the disease on African Americans. Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 30% of covid-19 patients are black, though African Americans are only 13% of the population, reports UKNow. In Kentucky, 13.2% of the cases and 17.8% of the deaths have been among blacks, while only 8.4% of the state's population is African American. 
• "A trade association for online sellers has filed a lawsuit against Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron that alleges it's unconstituttional to apply state price-gouging statutes to sellers on nationwide digital marketplaces like Amazon," Morgan Eads reports for the Herald-Leader. Cameron's office has an online complaint form to report price gouging. 
• An experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer has been administered to patients in the U.S.; the World Health Organization says this is one of eight potential vaccines currently in clinical trials.  
• Becker's Hospital Review breaks down how much funding hospitals in each state got from the latest slice of covid-19 aid. It shows that 542 rural providers in Kentucky got $372.3 million. Every rural hospital will get at least $1 million, and each rural health clinic and community health center will get at least $100,000, says a news release from Sen. Mitch McConnell.