Louisiana’s latest Covid-19 wave shows more unvaccinated people in their 30s and 40s

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“We are welcoming people into their third and fourth decades who are otherwise healthy with no real pre-existing condition, unvaccinated and very sick, very quickly,” Courmier told CNN. “We hardly see any vaccinated patients.”

Younger patients have meant that Courmier, the medical director of pulmonary and critical services at Notre-Dame de Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette, must have had difficult conversations with their children.

“One new thing I have to struggle with now is having to talk to four, five and nine year olds about their loved one and not being able to bring them home or be able to see them,” he said. he said with a catch in his throat. “It’s difficult. And I don’t want to go through it over and over again.”

“I have kids of my own,” he later added, “and it’s just very hard to imagine if my kids had to go through the same problem.”

Courmier was one of several Louisiana-based health experts who spoke to CNN this week about the increase in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations over the past two weeks. Their experiences are also seen in under-vaccinated areas of the United States, including much of the Deep South, where the coronavirus, led by its transmissible variant Delta, continued to attack the unvaccinated.
Dr Frank Courmier said this wave of Covid-19 cases involves unvaccinated patients in their 30s and 40s at the Notre-Dame de Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette, Louisiana.
About 36% of Louisiana residents have been fully immunized, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the fifth lowest rate of any state.
Adjusted for population, Louisiana also has the fifth highest number of new Covid-19 cases in the past week, according to CDC data. The count has also increased. The number of new Covid-19 cases has risen over the past 28 days and is increasing in all nine regions of the state, the Louisiana Department of Health said on Tuesday. Since the start of May, 94% of the state’s 19,200 cases have involved people not fully vaccinated.
In Arkansas, Covid-19 cases rise as state combats vaccine skepticism
Yet deaths from Covid-19 remain at levels not seen since March 2020. An increase in deaths could still occur, as an increase in cases typically translates into more deaths over time. Or that may not be the case at this point in the pandemic, given that the elderly, who are more susceptible to the disease, have been vaccinated at much higher rates.

In any case, the increase in cases and hospitalizations has been difficult for the Notre-Dame de Lourdes hospital of Dr Courmier and Lafayette, which has the largest number of Covid-19 patients in the state.

“We’re going to see more stress on the system,” Courmier told CNN. “No more stress for us because we have to take care of these patients. Once they arrive, they are in the hospital for weeks and months.”

Immunity either by vaccine or by disease

Dr John Bruchhaus, co-director of the intensive care unit at St. Francis Medical Center in Monroe, Louisiana, said a post-surgical intensive care unit was being converted to a Covid-19 unit .

St. Francis Medical Center in Monroe, in northern Louisiana, currently has the second highest number of Covid-19 patients in the state. Dr John Bruchhaus, co-director of the intensive care unit, said the hospital was expanding its patient capacity by transforming what was a post-surgical intensive care unit into a Covid-19 unit.

He said he mainly saw patients in their 30s and 40s who had not been vaccinated arriving for treatment. Most of them are mildly ill, but about 15% to 20% require hospitalization, Bruchhaus said. He warned those who remained skeptical about the vaccine.

Dr Sanjay Gupta: The Importance of Getting Vaccinated

“Over the next few weeks, it’s partly up to you how you’re going to acquire immunity: whether it’s natural immunity by getting the Delta virus or getting vaccinated,” he said. -he declares. “And the smarter choice would be to get vaccinated to prevent disease.”

That’s the challenge of Katie Barber, who heads the Covid-19 vaccination program at St Francis Medical Group in Monroe. She said they had given about 25 doses of the vaccine a recent day, well below the 350 to 400 daily doses at the peak of the effort.

“I feel like the people who believe in our health care and the people who want a vaccine got them,” she said. The challenge is “to mitigate and educate those who are not currently doing so and to be able to reach that population”.

She said she hoped that over time more and more people would come to see the benefits of the free and safe vaccine.

“To see people, to see their loved ones, to see other people they know and trust receive it, and see that they are perfectly fine. I think that’s really what it takes, that is. ‘is making it personal, ”she said. “Or someone in their family who gets very sick then makes it a priority.”

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