By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – June COVID data shows that deaths of Louisianans from this disease were concentrated among nursing home residents and not among the tens of thousands of young people who were being counted as part of a surge in infections.
End of month information provided on the Louisiana Department of Health website indicates 78 percent of the deaths across the state took place in these group facilities, even though these elderly residents compose less than one percent of the total state population.
There have been 3,113 total deaths among Louisianans since the first COVID-19 data was collected in March. But 348 of these deaths happened in June during the surge of cases among young people in the state. Of these deaths last month, 272 occurred in nursing homes.
At the end of June there were 23,058 nursing home residents among a state population of 4,645,180 men, women, boys and girls, combined.
