BATON ROUGE, La. — Governor John Bel Edwards said Wednesday, after a second day of nearly 1,200 new cases, that Louisiana now has 4 of the top 6 parishes or counties in the country in deaths per capita: St. John the Baptist has the highest rate in the nation, followed by Orleans, two counties in Georgia and then Jefferson and St. Charles parishes.
"We have a lot of work to do across the state of Louisiana," he said. "Not just in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."
He advised that he thought the big surge in case numbers came from a backlog of tests that are coming in, saying that Wednesday's numbers were based on 6,809 tests.
He also wanted to let people know that even though 34 new deaths were reported Wednesday, it did not mean that 34 people died in the last 24 hours.
He said that people could have died a few days ago and that the test to confirm that the death was COVID-19-related may have just come in.
He also warned residents that it may be quite a while before life is back to how we knew it before this outbreak.
"It's going to be a long time before we're back to normal."