From the Editor: Will the fourth COVID wave be the last wave?

St. Mary Parish marked the unofficial end of the fourth wave of COVID-19 just more than a month ago, when the School Board made masks optional for students and employees. Now we’re being warned about a fifth wave.
We’re now being told about omicron, a new COVID variant that seems to be radiating outward from South Africa.
Nobody seems to know much about omicron, other than it’s connected to a spike in cases from 200 per day to 3,200 a day in South Africa. We don’t know whether the current vaccines will work against omicron, or even whether we should worry about that.
But leaders around the world aren’t waiting around for details.
Based on one confirmed omicron infection, Israel is closing its borders to all foreigners. Japan is doing the same even though no cases had been confirmed there as of Monday.
A handful of western European nations where omicron has been confirmed have also restricted travel. And the Biden administration has blocked incoming foreigners from South Africa and other southern African nations.
To people who fear new restrictions hurt their jobs or businesses, or to parents and teachers who dread wrestling masks onto the faces of elementary kids again, the rush to close borders based on thin information will seem to be overkill.
But St. Mary’s experience with the delta variant offers some clues about why nations are rushing to respond.
Before the storm
Remember June? Balmy, hurricane-free June?
We’d made it through the third coronavirus wave over the winter — most of us, anyway — and nearly all the public health restrictions had been lifted. We could sit down in restaurants again, or have a beer after work at a bar. And maybe we could hear some live music, too.
Schools were preparing to reopen for on-campus learning without masks. Plans were underway for the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, which had been canceled in 2020 because of COVID.
Best of all, effective COVID vaccines had been in distribution for most of 2021, and they’d been widely available to adults for at least three months.
Maybe, after 15 months, we had a handle on this thing.
There were distant rumbles, of course. India was struggling with a new COVID outbreak, vaguely linked to a new COVID variant called delta. Horrifying news video shot at night showed aerial views of acres and acres of burning funeral pyres.
Closer to home, St. Mary people weren’t exactly tripping over one another to get vaccinated.
Dr. William Cefalu Jr. chairs the Hospital Service District No. 2 board. The district owns the hospital that is operated under lease by Ochsner Health System as Ochsner St. Mary in Morgan City, where Cefalu practices.
At board meetings, Cefalu said he was frustrated with the low vaccination rate here. He proposed a crawfish boil as a way to bring people in for their COVID shots. That didn’t come off, but the hospital hosted a white beans lunch instead.
If you’d seen what Cefalu had seen, he said at a board meeting, you’d run to get vaccinated.
Still, by the end of June, the St. Mary vaccination rate remained below 30% while the nation’s was approaching 50%.
Viral lightning
Around the first of July, the medical school at LSU sent a press release saying a COVID infection in the New Orleans area was confirmed to have been caused by the delta variant. That was serious stuff because delta was believed to be much more contagious than earlier variants. It also puts much more of the virus into a patient’s bloodstream.
Within a few days, two people I know in east St. Mary said relatives had tested positive for COVID, and a lady came into the office with an obituary for her husband, who died from COVID a few days before their anniversary.
That’s odd, I thought. The number of COVID cases and deaths, reported daily by the Louisiana Office of Public Health, had been falling for months and were about as low as they’d been since the pandemic began.
A few days after that, St. Mary showed up on an OPH map as one of two parishes considered to be at “highest risk” for the spread of COVID. That calculation was based on an average daily count of new cases per 100,000 residents and on the percentage of COVID tests returning positive results.
Then came Aug. 3. A text message from Dr. Eric Melancon, the parish coroner, to local reporters said that his office had been notified of three COVID-related deaths, all in east St. Mary, since Aug. 1.
The text had three exclamation points.
A text from the coroner with three exclamation points will grab your attention.
The fourth wave was on.
Counting the cost
In early August, Gov. John Bel Edwards reinstated a mask mandate for unvaccinated people in indoor public spaces. The mandate covered public schools, which opened locally with masks. The same was true for Catholic schools.
Also in early August, a photo of a tent being erected alongside Ochsner St. Mary began making the rounds on Facebook. The hospital said it was just preparing for a possible overflow from its emergency room.
On Aug. 16, when the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival board was scheduled to meet, I wasn’t certain the board would cancel this year’s festival, not after the region’s biggest annual event was called off in 2020. Despite the growing number of deaths and hospitalizations, the vaccination rate was still in the low 30s. People seemed to be taking the fourth wave in stride.
As I called around to find out what might happen, the answers were something like: “Are you crazy? Of course they’ll cancel the festival!”
They did.
By Aug. 20, the COVID death toll for August alone was 28, four fewer than in the year’s first seven months, Melancon noted in another text.
“Please encourage people to get vaccinated and stay home if they are sick,” Melancon wrote. “Hospitals are maxed. Resources are exhausted. ...
“Please beg people to put their politics, computer chips, FDA approvals aside and protect themselves.”
Statewide, COVID hospitalizations rose above 3,000.
And so it went until the surge reached a peak in early September. Cases, deaths and hospitalizations began to fall back to pre-fourth-wave levels.
Statewide hospitalizations dropped below 1,000. In late October, the governor ended the mask mandate and allowed most school districts — those that required students with COVID to be quarantined — to make masks optional.
The St. Mary School Board voted Oct. 28 to follow the governor’s new guidance.
Four people spoke against a mask requirement at that meeting, hoping to persuade the School Board to do what it was almost certainly going to do anyway. And after the vote, the socially distanced audience in the meeting room and standing in the lobby cheered and clapped.
By the end of October, the number of new COVID cases in St. Mary since July 1 had reached about 2,600. The number of deaths since Melancon’s three-exclamation-point text message had reached 74, pushing the pandemic death toll to 221.
In November, five more parish residents have died from COVID. The number of cases was at 8,584, only a handful more than at the end of October. The OPH puts St. Mary in the “moderate risk” category for COVID infection. The vaccination rate here is not quite 41%.
Along the way, Hurricane Ida disrupted testing and vaccinations. You’d have to know more about infectious diseases than I do to say whether the new restrictions and vaccination pleas worked, or whether the fourth wave of COVID-19, the delta wave, just ran its course.
Let’s hope the question won’t be put to the test in a fifth wave.
Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.