The current 7-day average of daily new cases is 61,976. This is a 64.1% increase from the previous week, & a 439.7% increase from the lowest average in June 2021.

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Cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19 are skyrocketing in Louisiana, causing record-high rises that Gov. John Bel Edwards called “scary,” driven by the delta variant.

Dr. Joseph Kanter called delta “dangerous and dominant.” It accounts for more than 80 percent of COVID-19 cases in Louisiana.

On July 8, when Kanter first warned that the delta variant had become the dominant strain of the coronavirus in Louisiana, hospitalizations sat at 351.

A little over two weeks later, that number has quickly jumped to 1,390.

Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist with Tulane University, explains how and why the delta variant poses the pandemic’s greatest threat.

What it means that the delta variant is more transmissible than previous strains of the coronavirus

It does appear to interact with the people that it infects differently than the viruses that we have dealt with before. And so what it appears is going on is that the timeframe that we were used to seeing with the original virus, about seven days of time from exposure to development of symptoms, and starting to shed the virus is shorter, some estimates are putting it three to four days, which is has a tremendous impact on transmission, it's going to cycle through people much more quickly.

In addition, what has been found in a number of small studies of people infected with the Delta variant is that they are producing enormously more virus than people with the other variants. And so that means they've got more virus to shed. When they speak, when they talk, when they laugh, there's just more virus there for them to push into the air, and thus potentially expose people to. Some estimates have gone from 100 times to 1000 times more virus particles. So that's a huge difference.

And then it's appearing that people are staying infectious, able to spread the virus for just a little bit longer. So they're starting earlier, having more virus and then lasting perhaps a little longer. And so that's what winds up adding up into then each individual who's infected being able to infect more people, and hence more transmissibility.

Whether the fourth surge will be faster than the three previous surges of COVID-19 in Louisiana

I think in the unvaccinated, and unfortunately here in Louisiana we have a lot of people who are unvaccinated, I think we are going to see very steep rises. The fact that just the other day, we had over 5000 cases being reported. Not all of those had been collected on one day, but a large number of them had been, over 3000 of them had been. That is numbers of cases and infections being identified that we haven't seen for a very long time. And for it to move from just a couple of hundred to those levels over the span of a couple of weeks, we are going to see this climb very quickly, I'm afraid. And we are seeing that kind of almost vertical climb in hospitalizations as well, which is really, really concerning.

More at source: WWNO

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