‘A cautionary tale’: Louisiana doctors face another wave of COVID-19

NEW ORLEANS Aug. 5 (Reuters) – Doctors in Louisiana have been through it before: exhaustion, grief and overflowing intensive care units. But this new wave of COVID-19 cases driven by the Delta variant is different, not least because it didn’t have to be.

“Where we are now was preventable, and that’s what’s so hard for my colleagues in hospitals to digest,” said Rebekah Gee, who until last year was Louisiana’s health secretary. and now heads the health services division of Louisiana State University. “It is very frustrating and unfair for doctors to see the suffering that is preventable.

The national vaccination campaign that began last year offered a new weapon against the novel coronavirus in addition to masks and social distancing. Health experts say injections can prevent disease or keep people from getting seriously ill, and the more people who are vaccinated, the less likely the virus is to mutate into something worse as it grows. spreads.

But Louisianans were more hesitant to receive the vaccine: The state’s vaccination rate ranked it 47th among U.S. states for the first doses administered, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data, and that had a major effect on its public health system. Louisiana reached a record number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 on Thursday, reaching 2,350.

“Look at Louisiana as a warning about what happens when you have low immunization rates in a state,” Gee said. “And what’s happening is that the virus continues to mutate, it finds available hosts and it spreads like wildfire. And the only way to stop it is with the vaccine.

Doctors say the low vaccination rate is due to a mix of historic poor health rankings, disinformation campaigns by influential people including the state attorney general, and the same ideological divide on vaccines witnessed by other deeply conservative states.

As the gravity of the situation leads to a rush for vaccination centers in Louisiana, Gee is still worried.

“What worries me is what will happen with the next variant – and the variant after that,” said Gee. “The virus could become more deadly. “

“The only way out is herd immunity, which accounts for 75% of people vaccinated,” Gee said.

However, according to the most recent data, only 43% of Louisianans had received their first dose and only 37.1% were fully immunized. The respective figures for the United States as a whole were 57.9% and 49.7%. (Graph on US cases and vaccinations) https://tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR

“EVERYONE IS IN CAPACITY”

One of the alarming aspects of the latest wave of Delta variants is its impact on children and adolescents, who were believed to be at low risk earlier in the pandemic.

COVID-19 patients filled every bed in the intensive care unit at the New Orleans Children’s Hospital was full this week. Doctors and public health officials have said they are seeing more and more critically ill patients who are younger and have no underlying health issues to make them more vulnerable. Two-thirds of hospitalized children are too young to be eligible for a vaccine.

At Ochsner Health, Louisiana’s largest nonprofit healthcare provider, positivity rates for people 19 and under hit nearly 24% this week. This is up from 3.5% at the end of June.

Dr Katherine Baumgarten, Ochsner’s medical director for infection control and prevention, said Louisiana is only seeing the onset of the Delta variant.

“We anticipate that we will need more intensive care beds over the next few weeks,” she said.

Some Louisiana doctors look like soldiers still fighting a war in which people far from the front lines have escalated. They no longer feel the support the public once gave them and say they face a worsening situation without the support they saw earlier in the pandemic.

“The ‘health hero’ signs may still be in some doctors’ backyards, but the public has sort of stopped buying,” said Thomas Krajewski, an emergency room doctor who works at several hospitals in the metro area. of New Orleans.

Krajewski’s wife, Geneviève, is also an emergency doctor. The Krajewsks normally say they can see 50 patients per team. It was up to 90 patients this week.

“Everyone is at full capacity. Things just hang on, ”Krajewski said. “If something horrible comes in through the door, it feels like everything could fall apart, and we just live on an edge like that.” You walk in and just wait for everything to fall apart.

Reporting by Brad Brooks; Editing by Donna Bryson and Aurora Ellis

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