Another single day record of COVID cases in Louisiana! The state is reporting 17,000 new positive cases, and given the shortage of at-homes test kits across the state that number is likely much higher. There are a plethora of factors to consider with this Omicron surge, from its severity in individuals to its impact on the healthcare delivery system. I spoke with Louisiana State Health Officer Dr. Joe Kanter to discuss the latest on the Omicron surge in the state.
We know for certain that the number of positive COVID cases is being under-reported, right?
No question. We don't typically get the results of at-home tests and that’s a large number of people testing positive. There's also a fair number of people that have symptoms that just presumed they're positive, and never actually get tested. There's more COVID being transmitted now in the state and the country than at any time before.
The theme on this show has been that COVID is fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing. If anybody believes otherwise they're just not paying attention, right?
It’s an incredibly humbling virus - it changes all the time. The data comes in very quickly and it is tough for people to make predictions about what's gonna happen. After almost every single one of our surges, particularly after Delta, a lot of folks felt that because more people were exposed the pandemic, was going to be over. That clearly is not the case. We haven't yet seen any sign of that, but judging by how quickly our case number increases and how quickly South Africa and perhaps the UK are coming down, I think we have a sharp downturn ahead of us. It's going to be very tempting to say that we're in the clear from here on out, but I wouldn't count COVID out just like that.
I understand this variant has variants of its own - there's over 50 and maybe as many as 80 different types of Omicron. Is there any significance to that?
It’s unclear at the moment. There's always variants, and variants of variants. You never really know what to make of it, except in retrospect. We know it when one variant takes off and becomes a dominant strand. We see this with all the variants, that they always change in very subtle ways.
Do emergency rooms remain overwhelmed?
I can tell you personally, because I work in the ER, that they are indeed overwhelmed and it’s due to a multitude of factors. Granted, the patients generally have more mild symptoms now, but there still is a ton of patients to see, and compound that with the staffing shortages… on any given day a significant number of hospital beds are inoperable because there's not enough staff have to work them that day, which means waiting rooms are backed up. Fortunately, we're not seeing the large numbers of intubated COVID patients like we saw before. Hospitals are still seeing some very sick patients, just not in overwhelming numbers. The increased volume of patients and decreased staffing puts hospitals in a real bind.
I've read articles that the healthcare workers who are interviewed are exhausted, feel invisible, and burnt out.
That's accurate, unfortunately. Folks that work in hospitals have been going full speed for 22 months now. There was a lot of camaraderie in the early days of this pandemic, people banding behind healthcare workers. I think that got people through the early months, but now we’re fatigued and burnt out. The general sense of how much longer we are going to have to endure this is a very human response. The new CDC recommendations for healthcare workers are more relaxed and that helps, but hospital workers are exhausted and we need to continue to pick them up and support them.
