New Orleans is a hot spot for coronavirus in the U.S. Why is it overlooked?
Orleans Parish has the sixth-highest rate of known coronavirus cases of any county in the U.S., and it’s the only county among the nation’s top 10 that is not in the New York metro area, an analysis by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate shows.
Yet New Orleans has gotten scarce mention in national discussion of the pandemic.
Over the weekend, for instance, President Donald Trump said he was approving major disaster declarations and National Guard deployments for New York, California and Washington state because of the pandemic’s impact on those places. Gov. John Bel Edwards on Monday requested a similar designation for Louisiana, a prerequisite for the declaration.
But on a per-capita basis, the pathogen’s known spread around New Orleans — and even neighboring Jefferson Parish — dwarfs that of any California county. With 567 confirmed cases as of Monday, New Orleans actually has more cases than Los Angeles County, which has a population 26 times as large.
The Crescent City has just under half the 1,172 cases in Louisiana, while neighboring Jefferson Parish, which according to the newspaper’s analysis is ranked 15th in the rate of known infections, has 252 cases, nearly a quarter of the state’s total.
City Councilwoman Helena Moreno said she kept waiting to hear the words “New Orleans” or “Louisiana” during the president’s comments Sunday night, and was shocked when neither warranted a mention.
Dr. Rebekah Gee, the state’s former health director and now head of LSU’s health care services division, thinks the city is being dangerously overlooked.
“Louisiana is set to become the epicenter” of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Gee warned in an interview Sunday with KLFY-TV. “Louisiana needs to be a priority. Louisiana needs help. We need more people; we need more creative solutions; and we need more assets to be deployed here so we can solve this problem.”
In a dire news conference Sunday, Gov. John Bel Edwards warned that if Louisiana is not able to “flatten the curve” of infections, the state could quickly run out of hospital beds and intensive care units.
Read the full story at Nola.com