Louisiana’s 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. This week, there is some reason to celebrate - and also to double down on preventive measures.
“Okay Doc, where are we at the present time?” Newell began. “A lot of the numbers seem to be encouraging.”
“The numbers are encouraging!” Kanter said. “In terms of what the virus is doing, we peaked around New Year's... we're clearly coming down, we've been coming down consistently for about three weeks now. As of yesterday percent positivity for the state is down from 8.3 to 6.4%, which is encouraging. Hospitalizations are getting close to a thousand and we haven't had a number like that in close to three months. All told we're going in the right direction but there's a couple of really big caveats on that. We're still very high - going in the right direction, but there's still a ton of risk. It's still risky up there. There's still a lot of disease. We still see a lot of deaths, and mortality is a lagging measure. We're over 9,000 deaths now. And the past three weeks, we lost a thousand people. So the mortality count is real. The game plan is to suppress transmission as much as possible, because looking ahead and with these variants, we think we probably have another surge coming up before this thing's done with us, and we need to get transmission as low as possible so that we can weather that surge. That's where our efforts are being directed right now.”
“I know that you don't speak in absolutes because cases don't really rise or fall for any one reason,” Newell said. “There's any number of reasons. Some being governmental policies, but probably the most important are individual behavior. The virus itself continues to confound us in many respects. Have we ever figured out whether or not seasonality has much of an impact here?”
“Exactly as you mentioned it, there are many impacts, of which seasonality is one,” Kanter said. “And depending on what latitude you're in, if you live up North, then you typically have a little bit less transmission when the weather is warmer, and more when it gets cold and people go inside. Oftentimes here, it changes a little, a little bit vice versa. We had a lot of transmission in the summer, same for us as a number of Sunbelt states... warm weather drove people indoors, and that's where you get more transmission. So we felt like we had a reprieve around the fall. Late fall and early winter with the holidays really shot us in the foot. And we know there was more travel. This is publicly available information. You can go online and there's any number of social mobility trackers that track aggregate data from cell phones. It'll show you that around the holidays, more people travel away from their house. So that caused our spike. Now looking forward for the next couple of months, I mean, it's going to be cold next week for Mardi Gras, but hopefully the weather gets nice here within a couple of weeks, we're going to have to leverage that. We're going to have to be cognizant of spending more time outdoors. That's likely how seasonality affects it. And we stand to benefit here because we're going to be able to be outdoors a lot sooner than most of the country is.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
