Long holiday weekend results in higher COVID numbers

Due to Christmas Eve falling on a Friday, there was a four-day break between the Thursday COVID update from the state health department and the Monday report, rather than the usual three-day cumulative total, for Avoyelles Parish. Readers may recall the last two updates before the holiday break showed 14 and 13 new cases. The report prior to that had seven.

Monday's report gives no clear indication of whether COVID is rising, falling or staying flat. The Monday report could be interpreted either way. There were 705 tests with 33 new cases -- an overall positive rate of almost 4.7 percent. That is lower than the 5.5 percent in the Thursday report. Dividing the new cases by four days, it would appear the incident rate had dropped back to below 10 per day. Those who figure there would be very little action in taking tests or working on results on Christmas Eve and Christmas might argue the per-day rate is actually between 16 and 17.

There were no additional COVID-related deaths.

All indications statewide are that we are in a pre-surge situation. The state had 12,164 new cases and 17 fatalities in the holiday update. That per-day comparison is also close to the Thursday report with 2,835 new infections and eight deaths. The four-day positive rate statewide was almost 17 percent -- 12,164 cases out of 71,970 tests. A scary statistic is that the number of COVID hospitalizations has doubled in a week to 449, about where the state was in mid-October when it was coming out of the "fourth" or "Delta" wave. COVID watchers are concerned this is the beginning of the "fifth" or "Omicron" wave.

Avoyelles' pandemic totals as of Monday were 7,514 infections and 181 fatalities. The state totals are 802,537 cases and 14,970 deaths.