Officials watch for holiday COVID spike

While the impacts of Memorial Day gatherings on potential COVID-19 spikes are not known yet, what will help the effort in guarding against setbacks is the number of people who are vaccinated.
According to Dr. Chip Riggins, Louisiana Department of Health Region 3 medical director, vaccination numbers are rising, and some people who have had the virus still have retained some natural immunity against it. Therefore, he said the number of people who get it in one setting are not big, and those don’t lead to big spikes.
“I’m knocking on wood as I say that because we just don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to the variants,” he said Thursday.
He said the vaccines have shown protection against the variants.
According to a Wall-Street Journal article last week, almost two million people boarded airplanes on the Friday before Memorial Day. That was the largest number of Americans taking to the airways since the pandemic started.
Dr. Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Wall-Street Journal that a case increase in areas where a high percentage of people are unvaccinated wouldn’t be a shock, but that he didn’t anticipate a similar spike in cases like what happened nationally in the summer of 2020.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a late May White House Press Briefing prior to Memorial Day that while increases in cases have occurred after prior holiday weekends, the United States, at those other times, didn’t have as many people vaccinated as now.
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data as of Sunday, nearly 51.5% of the U.S. population (170.83 million) has received at least one dose. A total of 41.9% of the population (138.97 million) has been fully vaccinated.
Louisiana ranks No. 48 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia for the percentage of people vaccinated, according to Becker’s Hospital Review, which cited CDC data. Louisiana had about 1.47 million people fully vaccinated as of Sunday, or 31.7% of its population.
Riggins said many people who think they have had COVID-19 and feel they have developed antibodies to the disease have not gotten a vaccine. However, Riggins said it is unknown how long that protection will last.
“It kind of depends on the variants that circulate, and that’s a little bit of a guessing game,” he said. “That’s your own experiment if you’re doing it.”
Still, Riggins said because of the vaccines’ effectiveness at preventing hospitalization and death, that is what is recommended.
Dr. Gary Wiltz, CEO of Teche Action Clinic, said he would have preferred government leaders wait longer before relaxing restrictions.
He said due to international travel, the United States won’t have a better idea of how much progress has been made until the fall. Wiltz said the introduction of variants to the United States due to international travel is concerning.
“If a new strain comes and enters the picture, then that can change the whole dynamic (without effective protection),” Wiltz said.
He and Riggins noted that the vaccines thus far have proven effective against variants.
With variants, Wiltz said, comes a need for the United States to ensure other countries are vaccinated, too, because the United States isn’t immune to strains that form overseas.
In a press briefing last week, the White House COVID-19 Coordinator Jeff Zients said the United States gave more than 4 million doses of AstraZeneca to Canada and Mexico in March, while one million doses were being shipped to South Korea. Additionally, President Joe Biden has said the United States would share 80 million doses with other countries by the end of this month. Even more will be shared as excess supplies are available.