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Governor John Bel Edwards gives updates on the state's response to COVID-19

3 years 2 months 4 days ago Friday, January 22 2021 Jan 22, 2021 January 22, 2021 8:07 PM January 22, 2021 in News
Source: WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - Governor John Bel Edwards said in Friday's news conference that Louisiana is better than most states when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine roll out process, though the supply will remain limited for the foreseeable future.

Edwards says the state can expect a rather flat allocation of doses for the next four to five weeks, resulting in another hurdle in the race to ramp up vaccinations.

"The limiting factor for us as it is for other states is simply the number of doses being allocated to us on a weekly basis," Governor Edwards said.

Due to long waitlists, extending vaccines into other phases right now is tough.

Dr. Joseph Kanter with the Louisiana Department of Health says supply far outweighs demand.

"We're in the middle of Phase 1B tier one. If you add up the eligible population there it's about 900,000 people, and clearly, we haven't had 900,000 doses being made available to us," Kanter said.

The lack of vaccine supply is also putting a pause on mass vaccination events.

"Unfortunately that means that we can't do the large-scale events that we've been prepping for so long. Once supply increases and once the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines become available to us, we're looking forward to doing that," Kanter said.

But as the vaccine rollout continues, the Governor warns Louisianians to be vigilant.

The Governor also says the Department of Health dashboard will now include more detailed vaccine data.

Officials also announced that a free new app for contact tracing called ''COVID Defense'' is now available.

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