Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards dropped into the show Thursday morning to share good news about the fight against COVID-19, and spread the word that if Louisiana wants to get back to normal quickly and get our economy in high gear, more people need to need vaccinated.
“Governor, it was so great to hear that vaccine availability seems to be increasing here in Louisiana,” Newell began. “Obviously that is welcome news!”
“It is, Newell, and I know you, you understand this, but we have to keep stressing it - the way we end this pandemic and get back to normal is through vaccinations,” Edwards said. “The doses are critically important - the arms are also equally important and we've got to have both. Next week we're actually going to get more than 148,000 first doses sent to the state. And that's in addition to a federal allocation that goes to the retail pharmacy program, and in addition to federal doses that are going to federally qualified health centers in Louisiana. And those are obviously smaller numbers, but they're still considerable. Then on top of that, and you still have other federal efforts through the VA Hospitals, through the Bureau of Prisons, through Indian health services and all of those sorts of things. So we're, we're making good headway.
“The good news is that we've been told that the doses we're getting next week are really a floor,” the Governor continued. “So we shouldn't go below that level at any point in the future, and in fact, allocation should continue to increase. So we feel very good about the opportunity we're going to have in Louisiana to get everyone vaccinated in short order. We've expanded eligibility, starting Monday, to every single Louisiana resident who is 16 and older, regardless of health condition, regardless of occupation - they're all eligible on Monday. The only caveat there is that the only one of the three vaccines approved for 16 and 17 year olds is the Pfizer vaccine. So when you make your appointment, you’ll know whether that provider is going to be providing Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson. We need those 16 and 17 year-olds to make sure that they're making appointments for the Pfizer vaccine.”
“We have been rope-a-doped by this pandemic for a little over a year now,” Newell said. “The other day you made a comment - when you are getting rope-a-doped, you don't drop your hands, right? You don't drop what's protecting yourself. And those ‘hands’ in this case are the mitigation measures that you continue to encourage people to involve themselves in.”
“Yeah, because we've had these surges,” Edwards “We had the initial surge - that was the one that caught everybody unaware at this time last year. You will recall, you and I were on the radio talking about having the highest growth rate in the world for COVID cases. Then we had another surge in the summer and our next big surge was that Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's time period. So in early January, we actually had the worst numbers of the entire pandemic. We're certainly better than that today, although all of our baseline numbers have plateaued here recently. We know that transmission is still occurring. I haven't had a single day since March the 25th of last year to report zero deaths. We've been reporting multiple deaths every single day for a year now.”
“We have to slow the transmission, and I want to tell you one of the reasons why this is critically important,” Edwards said. “We know that across the country and here in Louisiana, we have the UK variant that is growing in its prevalence. It is estimated by the scientists that in the next couple of weeks, it will be the most prevalent form of the virus. And it is at least 50% more easily transmitted. And on top of that, it appears to be about 30% more virulent, meaning if you get it, you're more likely to have a serious case of the disease, more likely to require hospitalization and more likely to die. So that's the tough part. The good part is the vaccines work against this particular variant, but so do masks. We can wear masks and slow the spread on the one hand, everybody rushes to get vaccinated on the other. If we do that, there is no reason for us to have a surge. If you remember January 8th, we had 2200 people in the hospital across Louisiana and today we have about 400. There's no reason to go back there if we will just take advantage of the safe and effective vaccines.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
