Louisiana’s hospitals are struggling with an avalanche of coronavirus cases that threaten to overwhelm the state’s health care system if the latest surge of COVID-19 patients doesn’t lessen soon, Gov. John Bel Edwards said at his press conference on Friday.
Edwards has increasingly sounded the alarm about the risks of overloaded facilities with too few staff to handle the crush of people with the coronavirus illness on top of the car crash victims, heart attack patients and others.
But the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 continues to climb, setting daily records for the last two weeks and reaching 2,907 patients on Friday.
Trying to boost the state’s low vaccination rates, Edwards announced the state will give $100 cash cards to the first 75,000 college students who newly get the shots. The governor said he’s targeting a demographic that is seeing some of the worst infection rates in Louisiana’s latest surge.
Ninety-one percent of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated, according to state health department data.
