State health officials say ninety percent of the new COVID-19 cases in Louisiana are caused by the latest variant of the disease, Omicron BA.4 and BA.5. Tuesday morning, Governor John Bel Edwards received the new bivalent COVID booster shot at Our Lady of the Lake’s North Baton Rouge clinic. He says the latest variants are highly transmissible.
“This specific booster is the most protective that you can get with respect to COVID-19. It’s really important that people do that,” Edwards said.
Nearly 18-thousand people have died since the beginning of the pandemic and the governor says people are still dying daily from COVID.
“I think people can get a sense that okay we’re past this, but we’re not past it,” Edwards said.
Edwards says protection from boosters becomes weaker after a few months.
“It is no longer about being fully vaccinated. It’s about being fully up to date and you are not up to date if you’ve had only your two shots of, for example, of Pfizer or your two shots of Moderna or your one Johnson and Johnson,” Edwards said.
This is the fifth COVID shot the governor has received. He received a flu shot too.
“We haven’t had a really nasty flu season in awhile, but we don’t want to have that this year when we are dealing with COVID,” Edwards said.
Health officials are concerned that after two mild flu seasons, because of COVID mitigations and mask-wearing, this year’s flu season could be an active one. The governor’s office says some countries in the southern hemisphere, which can be predictors of flu activity in the northern hemisphere, are experiencing their most severe flu season in five years.
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