Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear intensified state orders to prevent mass gatherings on Easter weekend.
During a Friday press briefing, Beshear announced that Kentucky police would record the license plates of all vehicles near mass gatherings, transmit the data to health departments, and enforce a mandatory 14-day quarantine for eventgoers.
“We’re having to take a new action that I hoped that we wouldn’t. It’s that any individual that’s going to participate in a mass gathering of any type that we know about this weekend, we are going to record license plates and provide it to local health departments. The local health departments are going to come to your door with an order for you to be quarantined for 14 days,” Beshear said.
“We absolutely cannot bring people together in one building like that, because that is how the coronavirus spreads, and that is how people die,” he said, later adding that the order simply asks people “not to harm other people.”
Beshear said the order does not apply to drive-in services that comply with CDC guidelines.
According to the New York Times, there are nearly 1,600 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state of Kentucky, with nearly 90 deaths.
Of those tested for the coronavirus, nearly 1.7 million people have proven positive across every continent except Antarctica. At least 102,500 have died from the virus, and more than 376,000 have recovered. In the United States, there have been at least 499,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, more than 18,600 deaths, and 28,700 reported recoveries, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
