Beshear: All employees, visitors again required to wear masks in KY state offices

All Kentucky state employees, including those who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, are once again required to wear masks while working indoors, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Wednesday.

Additionally, anyone who visits a state building, regardless of their coronavirus vaccination status, must don a mask when inside. The shift in guidance is “to protect [employees] and those they interact with,” Beshear said in a brief video update.

The new requirement, which goes into effect Thursday, came on the heels of a shift in guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which on Tuesday said everyone in the United States, including fully-vaccinated people, should resume wearing masks in public indoor settings in parts of the country where spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant is considered dangerously “high” or “substantial.”

“That changes a lot,” the governor said Wednesday. “It puts our workforce at risk. It puts your health at risk and it puts at risk our ability to provide services that are desperately needed in-person to the people of the commonwealth.”

Beshear did not explicitly recommend that all Kentuckians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, resume wearing masks in public indoor spaces, as the CDC recommended. But in the past he has largely aligned his state coronavirus mitigation guidance with advice dispensed by the CDC.

Late last month, when the World Health Organization again recommended everyone, including the fully vaccinated, resume wearing masks indoors to protect against coronavirus, Beshear said he was not yet considering that advice, in part because roughly half of the state’s population was vaccinated, which initially seemed to be keeping spread of the Delta variant at bay, and because the CDC hadn’t yet recommended it.

“At this time, there is no reason to consider changes in our current approach,” Beshear said on June 30 in a statement. “Our case count and positivity rate are currently some of the lowest since the beginning of the pandemic and continue to decrease.”

The director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, also said at the time re-masking for fully vaccinated people wasn’t necessary. In late June, in an interview on the “Today” show, Walensky said, “If you are vaccinated, you are safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States.”

But in the four weeks since, cases have risen dramatically week over week, both across the country and in Kentucky, where the positivity rate has lurched to levels not seen since early February, hitting 8.29% on Wednesday, up from 1.99% on July 1. The highly-contagious Delta variant, responsible for at least 80% of new cases nationwide, is driving spread among mostly unvaccinated Kentuckians.

Walensky said on Tuesday that her agency’s shift in guidance was “not a decision we at the CDC have made lightly. This weighs heavily on me.”

The change in direction is a symptom of worsening community spread, due to large swaths of Americans who are unvaccinated against COVID-19. A little more than half of Kentucky’s population is vaccinated, but the highest rates of inoculation are in cities. In most of Kentucky’s 120 counties, 60% or more of residents aren’t vaccinated. While the Delta variant is primarily infecting unvaccinated Americans, the rate of breakthrough cases — when fully-vaccinated people test positive — is rising in Kentucky and across the country.

Already in the last four weeks, as new cases have climbed, Beshear and Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack have asked that residents at-risk of severe coronavirus infection because of pre-existing health conditions and those who work in high-trafficked jobs considering donning a mask again indoors.

On Monday, the pair, along with Kentucky Department of Education Commissioner Jason Glass, released masking recommendations for K-12 students and staff returning to the classroom. That guidance asks districts to consider requiring unvaccinated students and staff to wear masks at all times while indoors; that universal masking be instituted for students not old enough to receive a vaccine; or that they consider mandating universal masking for everyone, which would “optimize safety and minimize risk,” Beshear said.

Of the new masking mandate for state employees on Wednesday, Beshear admitted, “listen, I didn’t want to have to go back to this. Nobody wants to have to go back to this. We hope that this is temporary. I truly believe it is.”