Clinton County’s COVID-19 case numbers continue to show positive trends as active cases here, as well across the state and nation, trickle downward.

Although new case numbers are declining, health officials are still quick to urge the public to not become complacent in taking safety precautions that will continue to slow the spread of the disease .

“Until the vaccine is widely available, let’s all do our part in slowing the spread of COVID-19 by wearing our face coverings, avoiding crowds (especially in confined spaces), social distancing when around others, increasing our hand hygiene, increasing our general sanitation, and by avoiding the touching of our faces,” was the message on Monday through a daily press/public information brief sent out from Lake Cumberland District Health Department.

In Clinton County, however, the COVID-19 vaccine is more readily available than perhaps in other locations, as The Med Center at Albany continues to offer vaccination appointments to the public at their remote location in the Welcome Center, just north of Albany.

The vaccinations being offered here have moved into the 1c Phase, including Kentucky residents who are 60 and older.

Those persons eligible as part of Phases 1a, 1b and 1c are asked to schedule a vaccine appointment by texting SHOT to 606-387-3646 or by emailing AlbanyVaccine@mchealth.net, or by calling 606-387-3646 and leaving a message.

Med Center Health will bill insurance companies for administration costs and individuals will not incur any costs.

The vaccine will be provided regardless of whether or not a person has insurance.

Clinton County’s case count as of Tuesday morning once again showed a downward trend and for the first time in months, the total number of current active cases here reached a milestone level of a single digit number.

As of Tuesday morning, according to LCDHD, Clinton County had just five active cases that were considered to be still under treatment and contagious.

The latest case count also showed that only two of those patients were hospitalized.

For the first time in weeks, there was also a span of four days where no new cases were reported here, from Friday to Monday, although for the past few weeks, no report is given by LCDHD on Saturday or Sunday.

The case numbers for the past week are somewhat skewed in that on Wednesday of last week, the LCDHD added some cases that had already been released.

On last Wednesday’s report, the LCDHD explained the situation by noting the following:

“Now that the new case rate is slowing, we are trying to sanitize our local data and reconcile it with state reported numbers. This process will take several weeks. Immediately, we have discovered 86 cases reported to the state that were not reflected in our local numbers. These cases are now resolved and released from public health observation. While adding these cases to our numbers will impact our total case count, they will not affect our locally reported 7-day average incidence rate as we entered them as previously closed.”

That same process also led to the discovery of an additional Clinton County resident who had passed away as a direct result of the COVID-19 disease, which added one additional death to the count, bringing that current total to eight deaths.

“The following death we report today was associated with a long-term care facility and happened some weeks ago but has just now been reconciled with the state numbers: an 86-year-old individual from Clinton who had also been hospitalized and released from public health observation as no longer contagious, but later succumbed to lasting complications from the illness.”

In another positive trend that surfaced with Monday’s case count here, Clinton County also moved from the third highest level of Accelerated Spread, referred to as the “orange” level, into the second lowest category of case number spread per 100,000 population, the “yellow” level, Community Spread, of between one and 10 cases.

Clinton County’s seven day incident rate as of Tuesday morning was listed as 5.59, which compared to a rate of 15.38 a week ago, and 20.97 two weeks ago.

Across the 10 county LCDHD district, five counties were in the “yellow-community-spread” category, Casey, Clinton, Cumberland, Russell, and Wayne; four counties in the “orange-critical” range of community-spread: Adair, McCreary, Pulaski, and Taylor; and one county in the “red-critical” range of community-spread: Green.

In regards to total cases, and the numbers among the LCDHD counties, in addition to Clinton County’s current five positive cases, the current case numbers and the number of hospitalized patients listed in parenthesis are: Adair 12 (1), Casey 8 (4), Cumberland 1 (0), Green 14 (1), McCreary 21 (3), Pulaski 81 (12), Russell 3 (0), Taylor 15 (1), Wayne 16 (2).

Clinton County has experienced 1,415 known cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began here a year ago, while across the LCDHD district, there have been 20,825 known cases and 376 confirmed deaths that were directly related to the disease.