The Lexington Herald-Leader does not publish a Saturday edition, but at least subscribers can get some updated content on Saturdays. In a story from Friday, we find out that the Bluegrass State’s COVID-19 vaccination rate isn’t as high as previously reported:

Data duplication error means Kentucky’s COVID vaccination numbers just went down

By Alex Acquisto | Friday, October 29, 2021 | 9:31 AM EDT

A major pharmacy chain unintentionally logged a few hundred thousand COVID-19 vaccinations twice, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Thursday, which means many fewer Kentuckians than previously thought have received their first dose.

Kroger locations across Kentucky, where vaccines are administered through its pharmacies, reported 431,100 duplicate doses to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal vaccine database. Those doses — 252,500 of which are thought to be first doses — will be removed Thursday evening and final numbers will be released Friday.

“The CDC has confirmed in their system that some COVID vaccination data has been counted twice,” the governor said Thursday in a news conference, adding, “This was not intentional by anyone,” but “What it does to our numbers hurts a little bit.” Three other states have made similar errors, Beshear said, but he declined to say which ones.

There is more at the original, but I will admit to being amused.

Jerry Tipton, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters — and it’s the coverage of University of Kentucky sports which keeps the paper alive — had an article this morning on the mask mandate for entrance into Rupp Arena for UK’s exhibition game against Kentucky Wesleyan.

As fans waited for players to make a “Blue Carpet” entrance to this year’s Big Blue Madness, a security guard noticed Pamela Buboltz’s mask had slipped off her nose. The guard motioned for her to pull it up.

Buboltz made eye contact with an onlooker (blush). Her gaze seemed to convey a mix of annoyance and can-you-believe-this? She shook her head from side to side after adjusting her mask.

“No one is wearing a mask,” she said when the onlooker asked about the exchange. “Look around. I see five people (wearing masks). They don’t work anyway.”

There’s more at the original, and Mr Tipton cited examples which ran the gamut.

I noted, on Twitter, on October 5^th:

One sign @kroger said masks are required, other says masks strongly encouraged for the vaccinated. About 80% of shoppers were wearing masks, but this shopper did not. If Kroger actually enforces this, I will shop elsewhere. pic.twitter.com/zBWUlRR7yW

— Dana Pico (@Dana_TFSJ) October 5, 2021

Both signs are still up, the one on the right “strongly encourag(ing)” fully vaccinated shoppers to wear masks beside the outer doors, and the one with no option other than to wear masks beside the inner doors. This is at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky. And while there looked to be roughly 80% compliance three weeks ago, yesterday it was down to, by my guesstimate, 50%. Even a few of the employees, along with a non-employee vendor, weren’t wearing masks, or had them below their chins, where they were of no use.

I, of course, did not wear a mask, and there was no one from the store entrance either encouraging people to mask up or inquiring about vaccination status.

But this was the most important story:

Two school districts in counties near Lexington are lifting their mask mandates

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Friday, October 29, 2021 | 1:05 PM EDT

Two Kentucky school districts in counties adjoining Lexington have announced that they are lifting their mask mandates.

In Nicholasville, Jessamine Superintendent Matt Moore said that masks in school will be optional starting Wednesday.

Moore said several factors went into making the decision including county data, student and staff cases and quarantines, the number of vaccinations in the community, and the success of the Test to Stay Program, which allows students who test negative for COVID to stay in class even if they have been exposed.

“I also communicated that, if the data does not trend in the desired direction, JCS would transition back to requiring masks,” Moore said.

Beginning Monday, Nov. 8, masks and face coverings will be optional for students, staff, and visitors in Madison County Schools at Richmond.

There’s more at the original.

Thanks to the Kentucky General Assembly overriding Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) veto, the decisions on mask mandates in the public schools are the province of local school boards, and not the state. The Governor lamented that he lacked the authority to issue a mask mandate now, and said that, if he had the authority, he would “immediately implement” an indoor mask mandate. The Governor also said that he hoped businesses would put in place mask mandates themselves. Well, Kroger has the signs up doing just that, but Kentuckians are not complying, and the store is not attempting to enforce the requirement.

But the most important sentence in Mrs Spears article is this:

In recent weeks, Madison County Schools has seen a significant decline in the number of active cases and quarantine cases among students and staff. That decline is in line with the number of cases in the county, officials said in a statement.

If the Madison County schools, which had a mask mandate since the beginning of school, is seeing a decline in cases “in line with the number of cases in the county,” where there is no mask mandate, doesn’t that say that the mask mandates have made no difference?

On September 1^st, Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford was shocked and appalled that UK football games was inviting Mr Delta to a tailgate party:

Then UK announced its COVID protocols for the football season at Kroger Stadium in an Orwellian orgy of double speak: The rules say if you are not vaccinated, you have to wear a mask at all times, even outside! Pinky promise you’ll abide by our honor system! You do have to wear a mask in indoor spaces. Maybe. If we check. Wouldn’t you like to see a UK usher knock on the door of a luxury box to ask some poobah UK donor enjoying a nice bourbon to pull up their mask?

I’m not sure how to rank science versus football in the SEC, but it seems that UK could have followed the lead of a peer like Louisiana State University. The Tiger Stadium can seat 103,000 people and they’re asking for vaccination status or negative test results. Yes, there will be lines, but also less likelihood to turn games into superspreader events. Then again, maybe LSU has a slightly more celebrated football history and can afford to turn away a few irate fans.

Except the ‘superspreader’ event Mrs Blackford feared never happened. As this graph from The New York Times shows, the South has the lowest “average daily cases per capita” of any region in the country.

On September 1^st, the day Mrs Blackford published her column, Kentucky had a moving seven day daily average of 4,320 new cases per day; on October 29^th, that average had dropped to 1,214. That’s a 71.90% drop, with UK football games featuring only a small percentage of fans wearing masks, with the vaccination numbers lower than previously reported, and with Kentuckians mostly ignoring masking mandates and requests.

Yes, while I am vaccinated, I have been mostly ignoring the ‘safety protocols’, and I have criticized them. But I can also get kind of numbers geeky, and this article was about the actual numbers. What the worry warts have been telling us has simply not been the case!