reporter: not anti-vaccine, she says she just didn t get around to it. the 44-year-old is now one of dozens of covid-19 patients in baton rouge s our lady of the lake regional medical center. her oxygen low, her doctor says she might need a ventilator. i just don t want anyone else winding up like me. especially when the vaccine is so easy to get now. reporter: the delta variant now prevalent in the bayou state. not only is it enormously infectious the delta variant is far more contagious, right? but that viral load doesn t mean i m going to spread it to more people, but when i inhale somebody else s breath, i m getting a massive amount of virus. reporter: it is spreading everywhere, in cities and rural areas. that s nowhere safe. you should be vaccinated and have a mask on, because we re inundated with covid. reporter: ronnie smith, 47,
why they put off getting a shot until it was tragically too late. amy matson struggles to breathe. what does it feel like to have covid? exhausting, extremely frustrating. tiring. and the fact that i am here now, i am furious with myself. why? because i was not vaccinated. not anti-vaccine, she says she just didn t get around to it. the 44-year-old is now one of dozens of covid-19 patients in baton rouge s our lady of the lake regional medical center. her oxygen low, her doctor says she might need a ventilator. just don t want anyone else winding up like me, especially when the vaccine is so easy to get now. the delta variant now prevalent in bayou state, not only is it enormously
chief medical officer at our lady of the lake regional medical center. doctor, thank you so much for joining us. how fast is the spread right now in your community? right now in the community the spread is exponential. and that exponential spread is because of the delta variant. we know now that delta variant carries 1,000 times more viral load and everybody who is sick with it and that spreads to more and more people than previous variants. last year s variant we thought was bad enough was far less contagious than this variant and that s resulting in just an exponential number of patients coming into the hospital. this morning we re sitting at 119 covid positive patients in our hospital, that s a 50% increase from just last week. we re looking at that chart right now. that incredibly steep rise you say exponential. you have your arms around it? is this something you can grasp? you don t get your arms around something like this. this isn t a controllable thing at this point. this
developing countries where they have none, and we re talking about a third here. dr. sanjay gupta, thank you very much. the state of louisiana reported nearly 6,800 new covid cases on tuesday. that is just 85 cases short of that state s one-day record for infections in january. look at that spike. look at the progress that s been lost. hospitalizations on the rise across the state. less than 37% of the state s population is fully vaccinated. joining me now to discuss is dr. tony jaginow from our lady of the lake regional medical center in baton rouge. thank you for your time. good morning. happy to be here, to be able to get the message out to folks to try to get this back under control. i know you said what you re seeing makes you want to scream, right, that s how bad it is. we are in a discussion with a
the rate of break through infections and the likelihood of that break through infection ended up in a chain of transmission to others. reporter: despite lingering questions dr. wen emphasizes the vaccines do work at preventing severe illness. and a sign that the mask debate is slowly returning missouri s attorney general vowing to actually file a lawsuit to try to prevent that mask mandate that we just mentioned in st. louis from kicking in. ultimately, though, what we did hear from the head of the cdc just head, kaitlan and boris, is that it should be up to individuals and communities to decide whether or not they want to put those masks back on as those numbers do continue to spread. but we should mention the cdc guidance itself when it comes to masks that hasn t changed, at least not yet. no, it wasn t, polo, but we do know officials are talking about t thank you very much for that report. joining me now is dr. catherine o neal, the chief medical officer at our lady of the lak