La. COVID cases reach new multi-day record after holidays

Louisiana health officials have reported the largest multi-day increase in coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, as the highly-infectious omicron variant continued to spread following holiday gatherings and as many of the state’s schoolchildren returned to classrooms.
On Monday, the Louisiana Department of Health said it had logged 24,433 new cases since Thursday, or an average of 6,108 per day over the four-day period. The only days with higher one-day totals since the start of the pandemic were on Wednesday and Thursday of last week.
The previous multi-day record was a three-day period during the Delta wave of the pandemic August 7 to 9, when there were a total of 12,227 cases, or about 4,075 per day.
Hospitalizations have quadrupled over the last month, with a total of 1,106 people hospitalized and 50 in need of a ventilator as of Monday.
The number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 remains well below the peak of the Delta wave this summer, and many of those patients are unvaccinated, health care workers said. Still, doctors and other health care workers are watching wearily as more patients arrive for treatment.
Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, which treats kids from across the Gulf South, had 14 children hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday. Just a few weeks ago, it was typical for Children’s to have between zero and two COVID patients at any given time
Recent data from South Africa and other countries suggest that the Omicron variant may result in milder infections than the Delta variant and earlier versions of the virus. But the infectiousness of the newer variant, which in early studies appears to be potentially many times greater than Delta, could still cause high numbers of hospitalizations, he said.
Fewer than one in four Louisiana kids ages 5 to 17 are vaccinated for COVID-19. Children under 5 are not yet eligible for the vaccine.
Many families traveled or celebrated with larger groups over the holidays, and with children heading back to school this week, cases could continue to surge higher, Kline said.
“I think that will catalyze the epidemic and make matters worse,” said Kline of the holiday gatherings. “And then you put them all together in the classroom, with or without masks, and I just don’t see how this ends well.”
Like many other times during the pandemic, hospitals are short-staffed. Children’s Hospital has over 170 employees out – nearly 10% of the staff – because they’re in quarantine for COVID infections themselves.
At Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge, the state’s largest standalone hospital, 105 patients were hospitalized with COVID Monday, said Dr. Katie Taylor, medical director of infectious diseases at the hospital.
Of those, she estimated about one-third are incidental cases — people who come into the hospital for another reason and happen to test positive. The remaining two-thirds of patients require admission for COVID-19. About half of those people are vaccinated and go home within 48 hours. The rest have a longer stay, said Taylor.
“We’re increasing at a more rapid rate than we did with Delta,” said Taylor. “Depending on how many people in total get COVID, we may reach the same number of total patients in the hospital.”
During Delta, hospitalizations were three times current levels at their peak, but Omicron is ripping through the population at a faster rate. Nearly 63,000 cases have been confirmed in Louisiana over the last three weeks. The Delta wave produced around 25,000 cases over three weeks during a comparable period in that wave of the virus.
About one in five people who took a test over the last week have been positive for the coronavirus, according to state data, which does not include at-home tests.
Taylor said that staff at Our Lady of the Lake have planned for a six-week surge due to Omicron. She said a smaller proportion of infected people will likely experience a serious illness than during Delta, but it’s already clear that omicron will infect far more people.
“If you look at the numbers for the surges, the first looks like a hill,” said Taylor. “And the next few surges look like little molehills and then Delta was a huge, mountainous spike. And that’s really the only one we have to compare to for the number of cases.”