BATON ROUGE - The state health department says nearly half of new coronavirus cases reported Monday in Louisiana were contracted by people under the age of 30.

Among the 845 newly reported cases Monday, 46 percent were among people age 29 or younger, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

The latest data cements a trend of cases in younger people, which has become more pronounced since the start of phase two. According to the state, the number of cases in the 18-29 age group, 10,779 total cases, has eclipsed all other groups.

Over the weekend, the governor himself issued a stern warning saying that age group was the fastest growing in terms of cases among Louisianans.

I want to call on the young people of our state to take COVID-19 seriously. 18-29 year-olds are the fastest-growing age group for positive cases in Louisiana.

It's on all of us, young and old, to do our part and stop the spread of COVID-19 in Louisiana. #lagov #lalege pic.twitter.com/JSV9lfr9pX

— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) June 27, 2020

Last week, hundreds of college students lined up at Fred's in Tigerland for testing after an outbreak was tied to the cluster of bars just outside LSU.

“When phase two happened, everybody started going out to the bars and started doing stuff so everyone was taking less precautions,” recent LSU graduate Barrick Roberts said.

Roberts, 23, says that he and was among the hundreds of others that went out to the bars off of Nicholson Drive the weekend of June 12. He believes that's where and when he contracted the virus.

It mostly felt like having a bad flu, Roberts said, but symptoms like shortness of breath and lack of taste and smell are still following him two weeks later. However, he says that’s not the reason why he's changed his perceptive regarding the pandemic.

“You need to do it for other people. You don’t need to wear the face mask and quarantine and stick to yourself for yourself, you need to it for everybody else. It’s not really going to affect the younger people as drastically as it is the older people but you still have to realize you can still spread it,” Roberts said.