NEW ORLEANS — It’s a troubling trend.
After great success in slowing the spread of the Coronavirus, it appears to be on the rise again in Louisiana.
Both LCMC Health and Ochsner Health System report Covid admissions have about doubled at its hospitals in the New Orleans area and across the state.
“We were down under ten patients across the system a few weeks ago. Now we’re around about two dozen patients currently admitted with Covid,” LMCM Emergency Medical Director Dr. Jeffrey Elder said.
“We have patient numbers in the 90s and just to put that in perspective, about two weeks ago we were down averaging about 50 cases system-wide,” Ochsner Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Sandra Kemmerly said.
Dr. Kemmerly points to Missouri and Arkansas as an example of what could happen here in Louisiana.
A John’s Hopkins heat map of cases in the past two weeks shows those states as having some of the hottest areas in the nation right now for Covid-19.
“I am concerned about what we are seeing in Southwest Missouri because the state of Missouri has similar health challenges as does Arkansas that the state of Louisiana does,” Kemmerly said. “Their vaccination rates, albeit low, are still higher than ours.”
Louisiana is one of only a handful of states where less than half of its adult population is vaccinated.
Dr. Elder says the state needs to do better.
“As a public health measure across the country, we have to get more people vaccinated,” Elder said. “That’s how we’re going to slow these variants down and decrease the risk of a new variant, a new more virulent or easily transmittable variant to be out there.”
Some studies show the Delta variant is twice as contagious as the original coronavirus.
“This week the more contagious Delta COVID-19 variant became the dominant strain in the country, making up 52 percent of all cases,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said. “In the region that includes Louisiana, 59 percent of all cases are the more contagious Delta variant, which has, in turn, increased the number of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and the percent positivity of tests.”
Doctors at University Medical Center and Ochsner say most, if not all of the Covid hospitalizations they are now seeing are patients who have not been vaccinated.