Louisiana’s Assistant State Health Officer Dr. Joe Kanter joined Newell on his program Thursday morning for his recurring weekly interview and opportunity to answer listener questions about wearing masks in public, finding antibody tests, drug treatments for COVID-19, and more.“There was a lot of anticipation about what the Governor would say this past Monday about the next phase in this fight,” Newell began. “There’s always been this challenge about whether we would do things regionally, or statewide. I’ve said from Day One, fragmentation would always be a challenge and create an environment where people would be Monday morning quarterbacking every decision… what can we anticipate over the next thirty days?“We anticipate the numbers going in the right direction, and moving into Phase One on May 15,” Kanter said. “Nobody’s got a crystal ball and there is some chance that the numbers tank, in which case we have to re-evaluate. But the Governor said he wants to move to reopen as a state and set the minimum floor as a state. If numbers go up in a particular location, there might be a need to hit pause on reopening, or even go backward in a particular parish or region. That wouldn’t need to be a statewide decision after May 15, but in terms of hitting ‘go,’ he wants to do it as a state and that makes sense. This gives us some time to get protocols in place, ramp up testing, ramp up contact tracing, and make sure that businesses know what the game plan is going to be.”
“Obviously in the next phase, we’re going to be talking a lot about testing and tracing. What is the relative number we would like to achieve in terms of testing?” Newell asked.“It’s ambitious,” came the answer. “We would like to be able to test four or five percent of the state’s population on a monthly basis going forward. We’ve been in discussions with the CDC and Dr. Fauci… some of this is just best-educated guesses based on what you have in hand, and that’s where these four or five percent numbers come from. We’re doing the best we can to pick numbers with the best data. For Region One, there are about 900,000 people there, so four percent would be about 35 or 36,000 individuals a month. Which up to now, we’ve been pretty close to hitting with the assistance of these large-volume drive through testing sites but those have since been demobilized, so we have to pick up elsewhere. We’re looking for a commitment from the White House to do 200,000 tests in May. We feel pretty confident we’re going to receive that.”
“On the contact tracing side, we’re going to look to hire anywhere from 300-700 contact tracers over the next month or two,” Kanter continued. “We’re going to look for 100% of new cases to be interviewed within 24 hours, and 75% of the contacts to be interviewed within 24 hours, which are quite ambitious goals. The work to ramp that up is happening really quickly now and we anticipate having it in place by May 15.”“There have been a lot of reports about a new drug out there from Gilead Sciences called Remdesivir,” Newell said. “They’ve gone through initial testing and it looks like the FDA is going to approve this for emergency use. Your thoughts?”