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COVID fills most of local ICU beds

Sunday, August 22, 2021
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Northern Louisiana Medical Center’s intensive care unit is full, and most of the patients have COVID-19.

As of midafternoon Friday, 10 of the ICU’s 16 beds were filled with COVID patients, three of whom were on ventilators, NLMC Marketing Director Tami Davis said.

The hospital does have bed space available in its progressive care unit, Davis said.

The strain on hospital space locally and statewide comes amid the continuing fourth surge of COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant.

Though the hospital has asked the Louisiana Department of Health for staffing help, so far it has gotten none, Davis said.

Lincoln Parish added 12 more confirmed cases from Thursday to Friday, for a cumulative total of 4,043 since the pandemic began in March 2020. This month alone has seen 322 new cases.

Meanwhile, Gov. John Bel Edwards and some of Louisiana’s top doctors are focusing on the pandemic’s effect on the state’s children.

For the second consecutive week, much of Edwards’ Friday press conference dealt with the increasing number of pediatric cases of the virus and what the governor said is the absolute necessity that schoolchildren wear masks.

“You cannot keep schools open and children safe without masks,” Edwards said.

Louisiana remains under an indoor mask mandate for all people ages 5 and older until Sept. 1. The mandate also applies to K-12 schools, universities, and other higher education institutions.

Edwards said 28% of all new COVID-19 cases statewide are in children from infants to age 17, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. In addition, school systems across the state reported 2,444 cases in students and staff in K-12th grade schools just the week of Aug. 9-15, Edwards said. That first-week-of-school total represents more cases than were reported any week of last school year, the governor said.

New Orleans pediatrician Dr. Kim Murkerjee, who’s also on the board of the Louisiana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians, urges parents of adolescents age 12 and over to get their youngsters vaccinated against the virus.

“I urge you to remove the politics from the discussion,” Murkerjee said.

Though the number of new COVID cases both locally and statewide continue to climb in almost all age groups, Edwards said there are two slight glimmers of hope: Louisiana’s COVID positivity rate has dropped from 16.1% to 15.5%, and for two days, hospitalizations dropped slightly.

That drop followed 16 days of record hospitalizations. Louisiana has also dropped from No. 1 in the nation for new COVID cases to No. 2, Edwards said.

But all of the numbers are still higher than any of the previous three surges, he said.

“We’ve got a long way to go, and it appears to me we’re all going to have to make adjustments to live with COVID and those people who refuse, might just die of COVID,” Edwards said.

• Confirmed cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in Lincoln Parish. As of Friday, 12 more cases were added, for a cumulative total of 4,043 since the pandemic began in March 2020. This month alone has seen 322 new cases.

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