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, as the last of the mandates and mitigation measures are being lifted across the country.
“Let's start out with the state of the state,” Newell began. “Where are we today?”
“You know, we're doing okay,” Kanter said. “We could use some more vaccinations, but we're doing okay. We actually have the fewest number of hospitalized patients with COVID throughout the state as we have at any point. We're down to 267 which is the lowest number we've had statewide since we started counting in March of 2020, when we had our first spike. That's evidence both that viral transmission is going down, and also that we've done a good job of vaccinating the people who are most at risk. So we're saving lives. The flip side to that is we still have work to do to get everyone else vaccinated. We're standing at about 35 to 36% of the state's population that has at least initiated the series - it’s obviously much better in older individuals, almost 75% of people 65 and above. We just got to increase vaccinations in younger folks. And that's going to be the focus for the next couple of months going forward.”
“How many folks are getting vaccinated daily now?”
“It's down to a handful of thousands. It goes up and down,” Kanter answered. “We've fallen behind national averages here. There's a lot of regionalization, too.. it's typically us and Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia and so forth at the bottom of the national rankings. So I don't expect us to really jump back up to the higher volume numbers where we had 30,000 or 40,000 a day. Now we're doing these smaller vaccine events. We're going into communities, partnering with organizations and then trying to get vaccines into doctor's offices, reaching people that we don't think we would reach otherwise, but it is a much slower process to get done.”
“Dr. Wallinsky with the CDC said that there was a slight increase in vaccinations after the relaxation of the mask mandate,” Newell continued. “That has a lot of folks believing that incentives are now the next stage that we need to enter. And I know the governor mentioned that in his last press conference.”
“Yeah, I think we'll be announcing something soon but I don't want to get ahead of the governor on it,” Kanter said. “A lot of states are doing it. In Ohio, they had a million dollar raffle. They still do. Their governor had a very interesting op-ed in the New York Times where he kind of walks through his thought process and his execution. At this stage in the game, I think we shouldn't leave anything off the table, you know, have a kitchen sink approach. And if an incentive program is going to get a few more people vaccinated and save lives, we'll be following suit.”
“I noticed that Tulane University announced an incentive program, they’re giving $500 if any member of their faculty agrees to be vaccinated.”
“I love that, I think they're going to get a really good response from it. They already have a pretty good vaccination rate, and Tulane is one of the handful of schools that looks like they're going to be requiring vaccinations for their students from the fall semester, which is going to make for a much safer school environment. Now I think if I was a business owner right now, I would be incentivizing the heck out of the vaccines for my employees, because it's going to keep them on the job more. It's going to decrease absenteeism and it's good for them. I think it's money well spent. So I really applaud Tulane for doing that.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
