BATON ROUGE — Louisiana is making strides in its fight against novel coronavirus, but the battle isn't over just yet.

Gov. John Bel Edwards indicated this as he announced Tuesday (Feb. 9) that current virus restrictions will not be relaxed at this time. Instead, COVID restrictions will remain in place until at least March 3.

Tuesday was an especially busy day for the Governor, as he also publicly received his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, a Pfizer shot, at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center campus in Baton Rouge.

In addition to this, Edwards utilized his Tuesday news conference as a platform to announce the production of a large-scale Baton Rouge-based community vaccination site.

Though involving the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, the site will be run by Louisiana State University and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.

OLOL intends to direct its available vaccine doses to the nearby research center location, which will make efforts to expand its facility into a larger, community COVID-19 immunization site.

This is expected to take place when Louisiana gets greater numbers of vaccine doses. At this time, however, patients must continue making appointments to be seen for inoculations.

Additional information related to the community vaccination site will be released in the near future.