Governor John Bel Edwards traveled to Baton Rouge General Hospital to receive his annual flu shot and Pfizer Covid-19 booster shot Wednesday. He’s urging Louisiana residents to follow his example, noting that getting your flu shot has one of the same benefits the COVID shot has. “Because if you go to the hospital with the flu, you are taxing the same part of the health care delivery system, uh, that you would tax if you in fact had Covid,” said Edwards.
Edwards says it’s been several years since the Bayou State experienced a bad outbreak of flu. He says, “the last really bad flu season we had was in 2017; 15-hundred people from our state died from the flu that year.”
The governor says despite the deadly flu season four years ago, last year was not as bad because of some of the steps taken to ease the spread of COVID which he said “is why last year with all of our heightened mitigation measures, the social distancing, the masking and so forth we actually had a very light flu season.”
As for the status of the COVID pandemic in our state, he had good news and bad news yesterday. He told reporters, “our case numbers are down, the positivity is down, hospitalizations are down” but on the downside “deaths are a lagging indicator, uh, they are starting to come down but they’re still unacceptably high.”
He says only 47 percent of the state’s residents are currently fully vaccinated against COVID.
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