State Health Officer, Dr. Joe Kanter, spoke with WWL’s Dave Cohen Thursday about the progression of the latest COVID-19 variant.
“We know there’s a lot of COVID being spread right now,” Kanter said. “The two variants that we really have our eye on right now are not the ones that LSU identified. What we’re really tracking is BA.4 and BA.5. And these two variants gained prominence during our surge.”
Kanter continues to explain how these two new variants are prolonging the surge.
“We would’ve expected at this point to be already peaking and going down in Louisiana,” Kanter said. “But there is some contribution from some of the new variants that are affecting our curve. In the New Orleans region, cases have peaked and begun to go down, although they are still quite high.”
Kanter says the new variants now amount for about 75-percent of all new cases reported regionally.
“Hospitalizations, while they’re going up, there are about 560 of them today. And that number has doubled over the past month. That’s a very small fraction of where we were at this point in prior surges.”
