State health officials are concerned about rising COVID numbers in the Lake Charles, Alexandria, and Monroe regions. Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Alex Billioux says while the state as a whole is seeing consistently declining numbers of COVID hospitalizations those areas have seen a steady uptick. That being said.
“Those numbers have never been so alarmingly large that we are concerned about hospitalized capacity, because that region has done a great job of managing their capacity,” said Billioux.
The number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized statewide continues to fall, it’s at 549.
Billioux says they track real COVID transmission growth by hospitalizations and not raw cases because case numbers can be influenced by increased testing. He says a substantial portion of these new cases could be coming from nursing homes in those regions.
“Averaging somewhere between 40-to-60% depending on which hospital you are talking about in these areas, could be coming from those congregate settings,” said Billioux.
Congregate settings aside Billioux says there is still evidence that a worrying level of community spread is occurring in those three regions, and that’s backed up by data from their contact tracing program.
“Which involve people coming together often, whether its living in close proximity perhaps in a trailer park or coming together in card games,” said Billioux.
In the Lake Charles region, Billioux notes the number of new COVID hospitalizations in many hospitals has jumped from just a few to roughly 20 new cases as of last week.
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