Ahead of holiday weekend, 6th COVID wave builds steam across Louisiana

The Fourth of July annually brings fireworks shows, family barbecues and thousands of Essence Festival tourists to New Orleans. But this year, health professionals are urging caution, as the state's sixth wave of COVID cases build steam.

While this wave appears to lack the rapid acceleration of infections of previous waves, some health care professionals noted the numbers don’t represent the full picture due to the prevalence of rapid tests.

“There’s not a particular region that’s been immune or not affected by the increasing number of cases,” said Dr. Sandra Kemmerly, an infectious disease expert at Ochsner Health. “We are seeing increased cases, certainly the community spread is real.

"The good news is the vaccines are working. The bad news, despite everybody really wanting COVID to be gone, it's still here."

Predictions difficult

Whether this surge will develop into a “tsunami wave,” like those driven by the delta and omicron variants, remains a mystery, she said.

“I quit about a year and a half ago trying to predict anything COVID would do,” Kemmerly said.

Statewide, nearly 1,050 confirmed cases of coronavirus are now reported each day, with more than 530 “probable” cases resulting from rapid tests reported as well. Before the current surge, the state was counting fewer than 100 confirmed or probable cases each day.

Still, those counts are a far cry from the worst days of the pandemic. For instance, in late January, at the peak of the omicron surge, the state averaged as many as 15,825 cases daily.

The current rise comes after COVID infections dropped to some of the lowest levels of the pandemic following the winter omicron surge. But they have been on a slow upward trajectory since mid-April.

This sixth wave, however, has not followed the pattern of sharp spikes and relatively quick falls that characterized the first two years of the pandemic. Instead, Louisiana has seen a gradual increase in cases since mid-April, fueled in large part by variants of the original omicron strain.

A significant drop-off in testing makes exact comparisons to prior waves difficult, but so far the state has recorded nearly 73,400 confirmed and probable cases since the last weeks of April.

While the sixth wave was initially concentrated in the New Orleans area, elevated infection rates are now being reported across the state. New Orleans, Baton Rouge and their suburbs account for the highest number of cases. But on a per-capita basis, northern Louisiana now leads the state, with about 437 out of every 100,000 people in the Shreveport area reporting a new infection in the past week and more than 380 out of every 100,000 people in the region around Monroe coming down with the virus during the same time frame.

The New Orleans, Baton Rouge and north shore regions each reported between 245 and 269 out of every 100,000 residents in those areas getting sick during the past seven days.

More hospitalizations

The number of patients hospitalized with COVID, which sheds light on the most seriously ill patients, has also been rising.

The number of patients reached a record low for the pandemic in April, when only 38 patients across the state had tested positive. The count of hospitalized patients has been rising over the past two months and now numbers almost 450. The highest count recorded during the pandemic was during last summer’s delta wave, when more than 3,020 patients in hospital beds had tested positive for the virus.

So far, the state has also been spared the devastating number of deaths seen in prior waves of the coronavirus. Since the start of the current wave, the state has recorded 218 deaths from the coronavirus. During the peaks of earlier waves, the virus was claiming twice that many lives each week, contributing to an overall toll of 17,412 people who succumbed to the virus.

In the Baton Rouge region, cases and elevations have risen above the low numbers of the spring, but those numbers remain far below the peaks of previous surges. East Baton Rouge Parish is averaging 66 new cases a day.

Hospitals report strong capacity in their hospital beds — also a contrast from previous surges, when hospitals said they were on the verge of being overwhelmed.

One worrying sign is elevated percentages of tests coming back positive. In East Baton Rouge Parish, the positivity rate is 14.4%, above the benchmark generally considered “wide community spread.”

Fourth of July events throughout the Baton Rouge region are expected to bring big crowds, and in most cases, there are no rules for masking or vaccination status. Parades, festivals and a major fireworks event are planned on the Baton Rouge Riverfront.

Dr. Susan Hassig, an epidemiologist and infectious disease doctor at Tulane University, estimated that numbers only capture 1 of every 10 positive cases because of the widespread use of home rapid tests. She said she has personally heard of more positive COVID cases in the past six weeks than she has throughout the entirety of the pandemic.

“There still is a lot of virus circulating and we are not capturing and counting and recording anywhere near the number of infections being experienced,” she said.

In New Orleans, the week-to-week positivity rate appears to be decreasing slightly, possibly indicating that the city has “turned a corner” but Hassig cautioned that the city is not testing nearly enough to make such predictions.

The rise in cases is particularly worrying in north and west Louisiana, where vaccination rates are lower and infections are skewed toward an older population, Hassig said.

Hassig stressed that vaccinations remain the best protection against serious illness or death.

'Tip of the iceberg'

Dr. Fred Lopez, of LSU Health New Orleans, said that the numbers likely only indicate “the tip of the iceberg” of infections.

“The lesson will be familiar at this point,” Lopez said. “Keep your gatherings as small as possible, preferably with everyone vaccinated.”

“We’ve seen it before: we relax a little, people get together, they’re not as careful then we get an increased number of cases,” Lopez said.

Hassig praised Essence Fest for requiring attendees to show proof of vaccination. She recommended that people wear masks indoors and be cautious at cookouts and other gatherings for the Fourth of July weekend that are likely to be multigenerational.

“Do a rapid test before they go to the event,” she said.

Reporter David Mitchell contributed to this story.