Dr. Catherine O’Neal on CNN to speak concerning the surging coronavirus unfold in Louisiana. CNN
A Louisiana doctor mentioned the coronavirus was inflicting an “exponential” surge in hospitalizations.
“This isn’t a controllable thing at this point,” Dr. Catherine O’Neal advised CNN.
The extremely transmissible Delta variant is fueling infections in Louisiana and throughout the nation.
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A Louisiana doctor has painted a grim image of the unfold of the coronavirus in the Bayou State, a unfold fueled by the extremely transmissible Delta variant.
“Right now in the community the spread is exponential, and that exponential spread is because of the Delta variant,” the infectious-disease specialist Dr. Catherine O’Neal advised CNN.
“That’s resulting in just an exponential number of patients coming into the hospital,” added O’Neal, the chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, a Baton Rouge facility that has extra COVID-19 sufferers than another hospital in the state.
O’Neal mentioned that as of Wednesday morning there have been 119 COVID-19 sufferers in the hospital – a 50% improve from final week.
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“You don’t get your arms around something like this,” O’Neal mentioned. “This isn’t a controllable thing at this point. This is blocking and tackling. This is every day making a new plan.”
She added: “We don’t have a game plan for three days from now except that we know that three days from now will be far worse.”
The doctor mentioned it felt as if Louisiana was headed towards changing into the way in which New York City was in March and April of final 12 months, when it was a world epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were hit so hard in March and April of 2020, but we never got to that point that we heard stories about in New York, and that was our conversation last night, that it feels like we’re headed that way, and now I could see what they were feeling,” she mentioned.
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New York had a COVID-19 hospitalization peak of greater than 18,000 in mid-April of final 12 months.
O’Neal additionally mentioned the COVID-19 sufferers at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center had been “almost wholly unvaccinated.”
“We are seeing some breakthrough cases,” she mentioned, including that “under the age of 50 should be rare in the hospital, but today that accounts for 50% of our COVID patients, and they are all unvaccinated.”
Scott Roe, a native resident who was amongst COVID-19 sufferers at that hospital, beforehand advised CBS News that he would somewhat be unwell than get vaccinated in opposition to the coronavirus.
“Here I am recovering, getting out of here finally tomorrow,” Roe had mentioned from his hospital mattress final week. “Am I going to get a vaccine? No.”
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