Louisiana’s Assistant State Health Officer Dr. Joe Kanter joined Newell for his recurring weekly segment Thursday morning to discuss the latest developments in the battle against COVID-19, preventative measures, and the search for effective treatments or even a vaccine. This week, as cases and deaths rise across the Sun Belt and testing materials become scarce in some areas, Louisiana’s caseload continues to rise and some trends point to more trouble ahead.
“I know our listening audience appreciates you being here, Doctor. The latest numbers are... not good,” Newell began.
“That’s to say it mildly,” Kanter answered. “We’ve had three about weeks now of really concerning numbers. Percent positivity of all cases state-wide is about 16%, which is extremely high. Also notable is the geographical spread, how much of our state is affected. We’re a couple of days out from the big visit from the Vice President and his entire health care team, and they made clear to us they came here for a reason. One statistic that popped out to them is that we have a higher degree of geographic spread than another state, second only to Texas. We have a lot of work ahead of us to turn this around.”“The number of tests we are conducting continues at a healthy pace,” Newell continued. “But I’m hearing from a lot of folks that with testing done both within the hospitals and at the outside centers, the delivery of test results are slowing down. Are you hearing the same thing?”“They were slowing down last week, it got better this week, but we’re worried that might be a sort of temporary fix,” Kanter said. “There are a couple issues, and both of them run up against really challenging national supply chain gridlocks. The first is that some hospitals in the region can’t get enough reagent to run the machines they have, so they have to limit how many tests they can run each day. Last week, the City of New Orleans testing sites had to limit at 150 tests a day, and you saw that in the headlines. Another problem is that other testing sites like the Alario Center, which sends tests to an out-of-state commercial lab, those labs were just not performing, and we’re sometimes waiting up to 14 days to get results, which is just absurd. So a couple of quick fixes - one of the big test manufacturers supplied us with a new reagent this week, and the Alario Center has a different lab running tests this week. It’s a hustle every day to get enough testing supplies and capacity. It’s really frustrating to be facing these types of challenges after five months of this.”
“A big story broke out in Florida that positives were being reported to their state databank, but not negative tests, which totally skewed the results there,” Newell said. “Other states are having an issue where the collection of the data has become very difficult for whatever reason I’m not sure what the infrastructure and institutional challenges are there. As just a layman looking in, it seems fairly simple to report this data, but that doesn’t seem to be the case!”
“I wish it were,” Kanter agreed. “The New York Times reported last week that so many states are still relying on faxed information from labs. That was okay when public health departments were investigating measles and Hepatitis A because the numbers weren’t that big and they could handle it. But this article describes health departments having thousands and thousands of pages faxed to them every day and having to sift through it, and not having the staff to do that. We’re a little better off here, we have a pretty robust electronic reporting system for labs… we’re better than most states with the data. There are tech glitches every now and then, but the public health system in the country is trying to take a Yugo and make it go down the highway at 100 miles per hour.”
