BATON ROUGE - After months of surging COVID cases, the number of Louisianans hospitalized with the virus has plummeted to the lowest it's been since the onset of the pandemic. 

On Friday, the state reported 213 people were in hospitals receiving treatment for the coronavirus. The past week marked the fewest COVID hospitalizations in Louisiana since March 2020, when the state first began tracking those cases, according to state data.

"A few months ago, there was nowhere in the country where COVID-19 was surging worse than in Louisiana. Now, we have the lowest rate of COVID hospitalizations in the nation," Governor John Bel Edwards said on social media Friday.

As of Friday afternoon, only a handful of states—Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, Delaware, Rhode Island and Hawaii—boast fewer hospitalizations, according to data maintained by The New York Times. All of those states also have a fraction of Louisiana's roughly 4.6 million population, with Hawaii coming the closest with about 1.4 million.

Unfortunately, the lull in hospitalizations only comes after June marked the start of what was arguably Louisiana's worst surge of the coronavirus since the pandemic began. In August, Louisiana shattered its record for hospitalizations, surging past 3,000 patients statewide at one point. The state also exceeded its single-day record for COVID deaths during that same timeframe.