Coronavirus: the situation in Louisiana particularly tense in the United States

Text by: Stefanie Schüler Follow

Louisiana has become one of the hotspots of the health crisis in the United States. This southern state has more than 13,000 people infected with Covid-19 and will pass the 500 mark in the coming hours. Its governor, Democrat John Bel Edwards, warned this weekend that during this week, Louisiana will be short of respirators.

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In the heart of the historic district of New Orleans, a city particularly affected, the streets are deserted. Since March 20, businesses have been closed, tourists have disappeared and residents remain at home. And yet, mortality from the virus is particularly high here.

" We have a lot of poor people, and who says poverty says health problems, obesity, diabetes ... conditions which we know are associated with higher mortality ", explains Julie Hernandez, professor at the school of public health at Tulane University, joined by Stefanie Schuler .

"We attack the hardest weeks"

This is the reason why the city authorities are transforming the congress center as well as one of the big hotels of the city into field hospitals. “ There are 70 patients who must arrive at the Convention Center today. It is likely that patients from Louisiana will be transported to New Orleans for reasons of centralization of healthcare systems and logistics, ”continues Julie Hernandez.

“ We will be turning around 9000 beds, outside the city's regular hospital system. For New Orleans, we attack the hardest weeks and seeing the Convention Center transformed into a makeshift hospital 15 years later, it's difficult. "

In August 2005, thousands of disadvantaged New Orleans residents fled to the same convention center after the devastating hurricane Katrina hit .

How to explain the increase in the number of cases in Louisiana?

Democrat John Bel Edwards, the Democratic governor of Louisiana set up screening programs early on. " And the first principle of surveillance is that if you don't search, you can't find," recalls Julie Hernandez . And we, we looked early, so indeed, we found more cases faster than places where there has not yet been massive screenings .

For this professor at the school of public health at the University of Tulane, the evolution of the number of cases only makes sense if we can measure the progress fairly regularly. " If you look for example at the Louisiana figures at the moment, we had a monstrous jump a few days ago, which is not due to the appearance of new cases, which is due to the fact that there was engorged at the level of the laboratory carrying out the tests. Once all these tests were analyzed, the number of positive cases, because we measured much more at once, jumped suddenly. "

In the United States , there is a tangle of public, private, state and city concludes Julie Hernandez: “ Which makes it difficult to have real clarity. As there is a total lack of leadership at the top, this does not make it easier to understand the figures that we see . "

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• United States
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• Health and Medicine

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