The number of positive COVID cases remains high in Louisiana, even as the CDC recommended a booster shot for people who are immunocompromised. A potential third shot is drawing criticism from scientists and those against getting a COVID vaccine altogether, despite the overwhelming majority of positive COVID cases during this Delta surge in the state being unvaccinated. Newell spoke with Dr. Joe Kanter, Louisiana State Health Officer, about how each COVID case is different, and the struggle to treat each patient.
“With more studies published and a surge in positive cases and deaths, I keep hearing folks saying that it's only people with comorbidities who are at risk,” Newell said. “They need to get off that storyline, don't you think?”
“Yeah, that's tried and true,” Dr. Kanter said. “You are more likely to have consequences if you have comorbidities, no question, but there's plenty of people that are getting sick and dying without comorbidities. Even if you want to come back to the comorbidities, 40% of our state's population has high blood pressure, that’s a comorbidity… If you take prescription meds, you've got a comorbidity, so we need to stop thinking about this as if it only affects some small percentage. It affects everyone, there's no question about that.”
“I keep hearing this storyline from unvaccinated people that they’re not facing a comorbidity,” Newell said. “What they’re facing is the uncertainty of an infection that even you, other medical and public health officials are confounded by. You can't explain some of these things.”
“Getting COVID is like Russian roulette - it's very strange,” Dr. Kanter said. “There's not a lot of diseases that are like this. We don't know why some people do relatively fine, but not everyone. And some people get awfully sick and die for reasons that we don't understand, and they don't all have comorbidities. If you're going to get COVID, it's like playing Russian roulette, and the odds are not absolute and I'm not willing to take that chance with me or my family. I don't think many people would either, if they really understood those dynamics.”
“I don't really think that people fully grasp how dynamically the data is changing on a daily basis,” Newell said. “When you read what's going on here, I don't know how anybody feels like it's not real. It's changing and it's changing fast… As you've said several times it looks like the vaccines are still holding up this month, but that may change next month - and it looks like it has started.”
“We are living in this pandemic in real time and the data's not perfect,” Dr. Kanter said. “It's oftentimes messy, but you know, this is like trying to measure wind speed and direction in the middle of the hurricane. It changes and you have to keep up with it. The CDC released three separate MMWR morbidity and mortality weekly reports this week, essentially painting a picture that the vaccines, at least Pfizer and Moderna, provide pretty good protection up through six or seven months. After that the protection begins to dwindle. It doesn't go away completely, but it begins to wean and you start seeing more breakthrough cases and hospitalizations after that point. The CDC came to the conclusion that it's a reasonable recommendation at this point to do a booster shot eight months after you complete the series. The CDC and the FDA committees are going to take a couple of weeks to look at the data in greater detail, but the data still is not going to be perfect. You're not going to get perfect data until one or two years down the road. We believe we can't wait that long. I think given what's happening in our surge and Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Florida, I think the rest of the country is trying to prepare themselves.”
