Hurricane Ida is forecast to slam into the state late Sunday along the Louisiana coast. It is expected to be at Category 4 strength at landfall with fierce winds up to 150 mph (240 kph). The storm comes as hospitals and their intensive care units are already filled with patients from the fourth surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, this one sparked by the highly contagious delta variant and low vaccination rates statewide.
Daily tallies of new cases went from a few hundred a day through much of the spring and early summer to thousands a day by late July. Statewide, hospitalizations had peaked at around 2,000 or less in three previous surges. But that number peaked at more than 3,000 in August. The number reported Saturday was near 2,700, still high enough to stress hospitals.
Gov. John Bel Edwards said evacuation of hospitals in threatened areas is something that would normally be considered under other scenarios, but it’s impractical as COVID-19 patients fill beds in Louisiana and elsewhere.
“That isn’t possible. We don’t have any place to bring those patients. Not in state, not out of state,” Edwards explained.
Officials at Ochsner Health, which runs the largest hospital network in the state, said Saturday that they considered evacuating some of their facilities closer to the coast but that wasn’t possible considering how packed other hospitals are in their network. Roughly 15 of their hospitals are in areas potentially affected by Ida. But they did evacuate some individual patients with particular medical needs from smaller hospitals in more rural areas to their larger facilities.
“COVID has certainly added a challenge to this storm,” said Mike Hulefeld, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Ochsner Health.
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