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, the rollout of the vaccine, and the policy changes coming as a new administration takes office.
“Doc, seems like there’s a lot of great news out there,” Newell began. “We have the Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine now being distributed, we have mass vaccination sites coming online all over the place. What does this all mean for us?”
“It's an interesting time for the pandemic - there's some conflicting trends going,” Kanter said. “On one hand, new cases are all down, hospitalizations are down... deaths are still higher than we want. We're reporting somewhere between 20 and 24 new deaths today, but that's down from what it was. It was 40 to 60 a couple of weeks ago. Percent positivity is down at 3.7% statewide and that's a decent number. In the greater New Orleans region, it's 2.72%, even better. So all that's going in the right direction. The flip side of that is we know these variants are circulating. We've got 18 confirmed cases in the state, we suspect another 69 and are waiting for confirmation from the CDC. At some point you can imagine these two lines intersecting each other. What we're trying to do is delay that point as long as possible, until we have enough of a base of acclimation to prevent a surge from these variants. If we do a good job backdating and reducing transmission until that happens, we will succeed in that - if we don't, we'll be subject to another surge. I don't know what's going to happen now.”
“These encouraging numbers are what led the governor to open up restrictions,” Kanter continued, “But the challenge here is that I don't want people to get the wrong idea and to think there's no risk. We still need to be careful. And as people go about increased capacity in restaurants and stuff, all the more reason to be vigilant. I'm pretty optimistic, but I still think there's a lot of reasons to be careful.”
“I wonder sometimes whether or not our reporting of the success of the vaccination centers and everything has developed this level of comfort and ease,” Newell said. “I guess what you're saying is, we still need to be on guard, we're not where we need to be just yet. Children have yet to be vaccinated, young adults have yet to be vaccinated, there's still a significant amount of the population yet to be vaccinated. I'm 63 - even I haven't hit the threshold yet!”
“Depending on how you crunch the numbers, we initiated the vaccination of somewhere between 14 and 17% of the state's population so far,” Kanter said. “That's not insignificant, but it's not enough, clearly. I think the reason why I'm a little bit tenuous in my assessment is that I do think we have this window right now where if we just maintain vigilance for a little bit longer, we'll be able to get enough vaccine out there to really not allow these variants to get more of a foothold than they already have. If we drop the ball on that, it's just gonna allow these variants to increase, and we're going to be caught on our heels again.”
“Have things changed as to the environments where we're seeing these transmission cases revealing themselves?” Newell asked.
“Yes and no, and the reason for that is that we're still limited in our ability to detect the variants,” Kanter said. “There's a big testing platform in region five that can test for the variants, and one in region two. So fittingly that's where we see the majority of our confirmed and suspect cases because that's where the most variant testing is happening. As we get more genomic sequencing capability across the state, I think we're going to see the variants go up across the state. In terms of where people are contracting COVID of any kind, it really hasn't changed too much. It's still in indoor spaces. We see a lot in office spaces, restaurants, bars, indoor meeting spaces, a couple came in this week from weddings. The one area that has changed is that we've seen a decrease in transmission in nursing homes, which no question has a lot to do with vaccination. We've vaccinated about 68% of nursing home residents throughout the state now. Since we started counting back in March, that's the one area that I think really has changed.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
