Ochsner Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Hart expressed optimism on Wednesday that Louisiana will be on the other side of the current curve of COVID-19 cases when Mardi Gras season hits its stride.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced a study that shows natural immunity from previous COVID-19 infection offers stronger protection than those who were only vaccinated. Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Yale School of Public Health, and Stanford Medicine all tracked the CDC's data.
Louisiana has already seen more than 82% of the state's total population become infected with the virus.
The study showed that the best protection against COVID-19 was seen in people who were vaccinated and then had a breakthrough case of the virus.
The three universities measured the Effective Reproduction rate of COVID-19 in the entire United States, and also tracked it across individual states. The Effective Reproduction rate, or Rt ,represents how fast the virus is spreading or not spreading. The study explains:
"Rt is the average number of people who will become infected by a person infected at time t. If it’s above 1.0, COVID-19 cases will increase in the near future. If it’s below 1.0, COVID-19 cases will decrease in the near future."
Louisiana saw an Rt over 1.0 between Dec. 2, 2021 and Jan. 10. Since then, the number has declined each day in the model, and is currently at 0.54.
The state was seeing daily positive rates between 30% and 40% earlier in the month, meaning three to four out of every 10 people were actively infected by COVID-19. That means that another three to four people in the same group of 10 would also contract COVID, and then only two to four people from the group could get it.
"Hopefully, if that positivity rate continues to come down, we may actually be, we should be in a much better spot," Hart said. "With almost 40% positivity, there's a lot of our population that have now been exposed to omicron, and that's a bad thing, but on the other hand, we hope that that will give some protection as we go into the Mardi Gras season."
There were 60,797 new cases reported on Jan. 26 in Louisiana, with a 7-day average of 15,428 new cases. Prior to the omicron variant causing new cases to rise, there were just 943 new cases on Dec. 1, 2021, with a 7-day average of 398 new cases, and by Dec. 30 there were 12,467 new cases in the state.
As of Jan. 26, just 51.6% or 2,397,954 people had been fully vaccinated, while 59.3% or 2,756,912 people have received at least one dose of a vaccine.
"We really encourage vaccination and boosters for the children that are eligible as part of the whole preparation for Mardi Gras," Dr. Sandra Kemmerly said.
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