Louisiana has a higher rate of COVID-19 infections than every country but one
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Louisiana in the past week reported 89 COVID-19 infections per 100,000 people per day on average.
That rate is higher than that of any US state - and of every country but the small nation of Fiji.
The infection rates in Florida and Arkansas would also rank among the highest of any country.
Louisiana has become a national coronavirus hot spot, with soaring case rates and an "exponential" surge in hospitalizations in recent weeks.
The average daily case count in Louisiana is even higher than that of nearly every country, as the epidemiologist Michael Osterholm described on CNN on Tuesday.
"If Louisiana were a country, it would have the highest rate of [COVID-19] infections in the world," said Osterholm, who is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
The state is reporting an average of 89 new cases per 100,000 residents per day over the past week, according to The New York Times.
The only country reporting more cases per capita is Fiji, an island nation with fewer than 900,000 residents. Fiji has reported a weekly average of 117 cases per 100,000 residents per day, but the overall case numbers in Louisiana are much higher.
Osterholm told Insider he accounted only for countries with populations of 1 million or more, since smaller countries "could have sky high rates with even just 20-30 cases."
In fact, the territory of Gibraltar technically has the third-highest case rate in the world, with just 26 daily cases and 33,701 residents.
When ruling out the tiniest countries, Cuba and the nation of Georgia have the second- and third-highest rates of COVID-19 infections this week.
If Florida were a country, it would rank fourth, with a weekly reported average of 74 cases per 100,000 residents per day. Arkansas would have the fifth-highest infection rate worldwide, with an average of 62 daily cases per 100,000 people.
The Delta coronavirus variant is driving a surge primarily in states with low vaccination rates, which for the most part are heavily Republican and clustered in the South.
Fortunately, vaccination rates have started to tick up. Louisiana, Florida, and Arkansas have had some of the highest new vaccination rates in recent weeks to stem the rising rates of COVID-19.
Read the original article on Business Insider
