Exclusive: New Orleans Health Official Discusses Coronavirus Plans

NEW ORLEANS – The rapidly spreading coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China last fall, has killed more than 2,900 people and caused worldwide economic turmoil. While there has been no diagnosed case in New Orleans, officials here are preparing for all scenarios.

We talked to Dr. Jennifer Avegno, Director of the New Orleans Department of Health, about the city’s plans.

What is the city doing to get prepared? 

The city has plans for all potential scenarios. Public health professionals are always taught to think about what’s the worst case scenario and this is not the first time that a similar threat has emerged. If you think back a few years, you can think of Zika and Ebola. And every year we prepare for flu season. 

So we are reviewing all of our relevant plans, working hand in hand with the Louisiana Department of Health, which has pandemic plans should a broad-scale epidemic be called. We’re participating in weekly calls with the Centers for Disease Control. We began having meetings well before Mardi Gras with hospitals, the airport and prison leaders. Everybody that this might affect. We’re all on the same page and, should the worst happen, we’ll all be ready to move forward.

What’s the worst-case scenario?

It’s really hard to predict. There’s a lot we don’t know about this virus, but look at what’s going on in China. Obviously it’s spread pretty quickly and they had to take some pretty drastic measures in order to contain the spread. So they really shut down the whole country. Businesses, schools and everything like that [here] would be impacted. We really think the chance of that happening in the US is very low. But of course, we’re going to look to the CDC for guidance.

We are thinking through what it might look like to implement social distancing measures. What mass gatherings would look like, how businesses would be disrupted. And that’s something that every health department around the country is doing right now. 

Is it especially hard to limit social contact in New Orleans where we’re a tourist economy and we seem to be having a Mardi Gras-scale party every few weeks?

We’re not unlike a lot of big municipalities in the US … and New Orleans is really good at anticipating disasters, right? I would venture to guess that most businesses in our city already have some sort of emergency plan because we’re so used to doing it for hurricane season.

Right now, we’re recommending to businesses that they take whatever their emergency plan is and just look at it as if it wasn’t a tropical storm, but it was a virus and we have to let people work from home. If workers get sick, you need to keep things rolling but you don’t want them coming to work and infecting everybody else.

Are there any specific things you recommend New Orleanians do now?

There are some very basic things that we recommend every flu season that are absolutely applicable here. One is to wash your hands for a long time with soap and water. That’s the best way to prevent the spread of any kind of disease. It’s actually better than hand sanitizer. 

If you’re sick, stay home. There will be another festival next year, right? You’re not going to miss out on anything. Don’t go to work, don’t go to school and make your coworkers sick. Get your flu shot if you’re of the right age or condition. Making sure you’re as healthy as possible limits your risks if the worst-case scenario does happen.

Are we any closer to having any kind of reliable testing kits?

Yes. Actually the state expects to be able to start testing early next week  because the CDC has sorted out the issues they were having. And so that’s good news. There has yet to be a case in Louisiana. We’ve yet to even have any reason to assess anybody in Louisiana. But now we are going to have the ability to do it closer to home.

Do you have any particular concern since we are a port city and we have so many people coming and going?

We’ve been meeting with port officials, the Coast Guard and MSY for weeks now and there is a very stringent screening process for anybody coming in and out of the port or the airport. People are being routed through one of 11 airports if they’re coming from a high-risk area and MSY is not one. Nobody’s going to get to MSY before they have been through one of these screening airports.

It’s the same thing with the cruise ships. There is not a cruise ship that comes to us from Asia and they are tracking passengers in multiple places before they get to us. So the likelihood is almost zero that somebody is going to get on a cruise ship and get to New Orleans without having been screened multiple times.

We do expect the CDC might suggest new travel guidelines because there are now bigger outbreaks in countries like South Korea and Japan. We’re waiting for that and as soon as they change, we’ll make sure our procedures are the same. But we’ve gone through exercises with the airports and we’re very comfortable that we’ll know if something is coming our way.