 Thanks for checking this video out. Your mountaintop news video is coming up in just a minute. Did you know that it's going to be watched thousands of times, shared a bunch of times, likes, comments, you name it, it's going to be there. Why is it your ad here? Call me. On Monday, Kentucky's number of positive COVID-19 cases surpassed 500,000 as numbers continue to increase with the discovery of the new Delta variant of COVID-19. I spoke with Pot County Public Health Director Tammy Riley to discuss the number of new cases within the county and how those numbers could affect our local hospitals. Currently, we have 462 active cases and 114 deceased and we have 6,632 total cases that have been reported to us today. Those are official documented COVID-19 cases. On Monday, we had 50 COVID-19 hospitalizations. Compare that to just a couple of weeks ago where we stayed in the mid to lower 20s as far as number hospitalized and that remained for weeks and weeks, so just since last week we've jumped from 2526 hospitalizations to 50 on Monday, 66 yesterday and this morning our two hospitals in Pot County are holding 70 COVID-19 patients. Many of those requiring ICU beds. We have a certain number requiring ventilators, so all those numbers are starting to climb. But Tammy says that it's not the capacity or ability to acquire more beds for hospitals and actually more about staffing and keeping our frontline health care workers safe from contracting COVID-19. And when a community is having the top of spread that we're having, it also impacts health care and the ability to ramp up and have that top of specialized care and to keep their own staff safe and healthy and have the ability to manage that many patients when those numbers are expanding so quickly. As more samples are sent off for testing to determine whether someone was infected by the Delta variant of COVID-19, Tammy adds that scientists are seeing a higher number of Delta cases from those tests. Yes, I did receive a report from the state epidemiologists. The state is doing and across the state, there is a low or a small number or percentage of samples that are being sequenced, but we're at about a 5% sampling right now and we're seeing about a 68% prevalence of Delta and that 5% sampling. Of the recent 70 hospitalizations in Pike County, 21 of the 70 are Pike County residents. Out of the 21 individuals, only three were vaccinated. And even just the numbers locally showing that there are benefits to the vaccination. It is preventing severe disease, it is preventing hospitalizations, and ultimately it's preventing death. Additionally, Tammy says that they have received an increase in phone calls of people requesting vaccination. To help provide the community with more opportunities to receive a vaccine, the Pike County Health Department has increased their hours and have plans of mobile vaccine efforts. So you can walk into the Pike County Health Department clinic Monday through Friday from 9am until noon and then 1 until about 3.30 in the afternoon. You can just walk in. We have Moderna in stock. We'll come to you. We'll do mobile pop-up clinics and offer it to you as well. Your place of employment, your neighborhood, your apartment complex, your civic organization, your church, we are more than willing to come out and provide that service. For more information on how you can receive a COVID-19 vaccine, contact the Pike County Health Department by calling 606-437-5500. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Jeremy Justice.