year, but rough. and i think it s frustrating because what s happening is it s largely preventable because it s really the unvaccinated that are causing the hospitals to have capacity problems. that makes it much more tragic that this could have been prevented if more people would have been vaccinated. dr. o neal, the cdc s updated guidance, they re saying that they have this new isolation guidance for people that have tested positive for covid, saying that people can stop isolation after five days if they don t have symptoms or if their symptoms are resolving as long as they wear a mask the next five days. do you agree with this? because much of us seems to be in response to staffing shortages, not just in hospitals, but in other sectors. are we sacrificing good health practices to make sure there are enough people out there to keep the country running? absolutely agree with shortening isolation. we know there are many, many
maintaining hospital operations and that s where the federal government assets may come in very handy. systemically, i don t think we ll see what we saw like last year because so many have been vaccinated. we have more tools. it s not the beginning of the pandemic. it s sort of a new phase because over 200 million people, 61% of the population are fully vaccinated. dr. o neal, louisiana is one of a few states where hospitalizations have risen by at least 50% compared to last week. that is nowhere near the peak the state saw in the fall. what are you seeing right now in your facility? we re seeing in our facility today a tripling of admissions over the last week, and a tripling of e.d. visits. the combination caused us to be scare in our number of tests we re able to provide to patients as they come in to seek care. when you come into the doors of the hospital, we re seeing our vaccinated patients aren t getting sick and our frail vaccinated patients need admission, but their admiss
respiratory virus. absolutely. here for its third calendar year. dr. o neal, let s take a listener to what the world health organization said about what this year could look like. we have two faces of the pandemic. the pandemic that s associated with the tragedy of death and hospitalizations, that can end in 2022. the virus itself is very unlikely to go away completely. we ll probably settle down into a pattern of transformation, low level, causing occasional outbreaks in undervaccinated populations. we hope that that is the end game here. but we re certainly not there yet. how exactly do we get there, to the end game? what do you see happening over the next few months? the end game has always been very clear, and maybe we haven t been clear about it, but to get to the point that s a very hopeful message that we have endemic spread only, that this