Entergy is proud to support programing on LPB and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.
The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.
Additional support provided by the Fred B. and Ruth B. Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.
The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
With support from viewers like you.
We wanted to show all the good Louisiana has to offer a familiar showpiece, pays off big for tourism.
So there's more potential for people to get both infections at the same time.
Is flurona the twindemic medical experts feared?
But our mission is really to grow young professionals in the area.
The plan to keep young talent from leaving Louisiana and I thought like, I'm just going to have to shut everything down.
Supply chain woes adding insult to injury for Mardi Gras artist.
Hi everyone, I'm Kara St. Cyr and I'm Andre Moreau.
Louisiana sets another COVID record for most daily cases.
On Wednesday, the Health Department reported 17,592 new cases.
It beat last week's record by 3000.
The number of hospitalizations also increasing rapidly.
132 patients are currently on ventilators and experts, they say they don't see any slowing for the surge.
Dr. Joseph Kanter from LDH says health officials aren't really sure.
Even if we've seen the peak yet, the growth has been so, so explosive that if you look on graphs nationwide of case counts , they've had to change the y axis because the rate of growth has been just so, so extreme over the past couple of weeks and this past week really, unfortunately has been no different.
On a more positive note, Kanter did say that the number of patients entering emergency rooms has dipped from 16.7% to 12.9% in one week.
Now, Governor John Bel Edwards said he won't be reinstating any mandates, but some cities are creating their own.
New Orleans is now requiring a face covering indoors to manage the COVID spread before Carnival season.
The mandate went into effect Wednesday at 6:00 a.m., and it also applies to participants in the annual Mardi Gras balls that take place in the city.
And now let's look at other news headlines from around the state.
The Public Affairs Research Council: PAR; released a new report that details how Louisiana lawmakers are using the state's budget boom to pay off much of a 1.1 billion dollar multi-year debt.
The money is owed to the federal government for the flood protection system strategically built around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
The payments will save Louisiana billions of dollars in interest charges.
A big changes in the works for the Treasure Chest Casino in Kenner.
They've announced plans to move onto land as part of a 95 million dollar expansion.
A 2018 Louisiana law cleared the way for floating casinos to move onto land.
The treasure chest has been docked on Lake Pontchartrain in Kenner since 1994.
A federal court has again rejected a central pastors lawsuit over Governor John Bel Edwards past COVID 19 restrictions on public gatherings.
A Baton Rouge judge said Tony Spells lawsuit is moot because the restrictions long ago expired.
He also ruled there was never a clearly established right to unrestricted religious liberty.
The current rise of COVID cases will keep the state Supreme Court building in New Orleans off limits to the public for now.
It's been that way since December, a court statement says.
Court filings will be accepted at the main entrance.
But electronic filing is encouraging.
The governor this week unveiled the state's final plan for reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. three main components of the plan include a dramatic shift to electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar, using that electricity to power the state's huge industrial base and requiring industries using high intensity heat processes to switch from carbon based fuels to hydrogen.
News of the plan came during an online Zoom meeting of the Climate Initiatives Task Force.
Thousands of animals are dead after a pipeline from Collins pipeline company ruptured, spilling more than 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel into a coastal wetland between Chalmette and Bayou Savage National Wildlife Refuge.
The leak was discovered December 27th.
The State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries are now cleaning and treating 72 diesel covered alligators affected by this spill, plus dozens of snakes and turtles.
An inspection in October 2020 discovered that the pipeline had external corrosion, but repairs were never made.
And 2021, Louisiana had the fifth highest population loss among all states in the US.
Now we had a pandemic, we have a pandemic.
We also had hurricanes.
But population loss in Louisiana is really not anything new.
And that's especially among young professionals who may go to school here and then leave for greener pastures like Atlanta or Houston .
The question is how to change that, and Morgan Almeida, a 26 LSU graduate, is here to tell us about that.
You're involved with a group that is working to change that, and you see some hope.
I believe I do.
Well, thank you for having me, and I'm excited to talk about this.
Yes.
I am currently president of Form 225, which is Baton Rouge, his largest young professionals organization.
So our mission is really to grow young professionals in the area through philanthropic efforts, civic efforts and just helping them become leaders within their own organizations.
You grew up here and in the past several years when a lot of people in your age group may have moved to bigger cities or other states, you've found that this was a great place to be.
So how do you get that message out?
Yeah, honestly.
So the very truth of it is I decided to stay because the form two to five, I got involved straight out of college, not going to lie.
I was super intimidated at the beginning, but here we are, six years down the road and I'm now president of the organization.
But it was really the opportunities that the organization provides that allowed me to grow here in my community and stay, and I do really see good things happening in Baton Rouge.
I think our biggest struggle right now is we don't talk about them.
And so I think that's one of the reasons some young professionals are leaving because they just don't know about the good things about the good thing.
Yes.
So let's talk about some of them.
Yeah.
So I'm very excited.
We did recently announce a new partnership with our local economic development organization.
The Baton Rouge Area Chamber in this partnership is allowing us to better engage with local businesses.
Our business community knows that young professionals want a great quality of life and we have the stuff that going on in the works.
You know, we know we're working on our infrastructure, we're working on better schools.
We hear those things.
But do young professionals know about the other things that are going on right now?
This partnership is allowing for them to go to businesses, get those businesses to involve their young professionals with us to see those things.
They need a life outside of work and we can give them the forms been around for a while, but this is a different approach than before.
Oh, absolutely.
I think we've always known form has an ability to be a talent retention tool, and it's kind of been an added bonus of our organization.
But I think our board really took an intentional step by partnering with Barack to expand that reach of talent retention and show how we can be an economic force as well.
OK, improving schools, change leaders, fixed taxes.
Those are three basic things that you might as well say.
Let's go to the Moon right now, right?
It sounds like, but those are three basic things that are reasons why people would stay or any of those feasible in the short term.
I, I definitely see change is happening now in the short term.
There are things going on in our community and I've been really excited for has recently released a young professional platform.
We did that during the pandemic, but it was just eight things our members and other young professionals in the community are very passionate about.
And we just that platform was saying, we want to partner on those things.
Let's push together now with quality of life, has important amenities.
Does the capital region?
Does Louisiana as a whole have enough of those things to attract the young professionals not to flee the state?
Oh, I absolutely think so.
I think our main problem is letting people know those things.
We are very focused on the negatives.
So often I find that they're not hearing about some of these other things, like the potential inner city rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
That's amazing.
And that's potential still, well, well, but it's closer and closer.
Yeah, yes.
Yes.
And that's not just great for Baton Rouge, that's great for New Orleans as well in our surrounding super region as we like to call it.
Let me ask you about blight, because Louisiana keeps Louisiana beautiful.
Yet you go around a lot of Louisiana cities and there seems to be a lack of pride across the state as a matter of fact, because you see litter and a lot of places and you don't see that necessarily.
And some other major metro areas as much.
And we do have organizations that are tackling that.
Like you said, keep Louisiana beautiful.
And I think that for one thing, one stance we take is volunteering with those organizations.
So we like to create relationships with them.
Show young professionals in the community, yes, it might not look great now, but there are these organizations out there doing those things and you can be part of it.
Morgan, thanks for being here.
Thanks for telling us about this new partnership and about going forward.
Thank you.
Young professionals and others listen up.
There is much more information about this on the forum225 Website Forum225.org Doctors have long been concerned about the occurrence of a twindemic, since the start of COVID 19.
Now that flu cases are on the rise, patients all over the world are coming down with flurona.
A co-infection of the influenza and COVID 19.
Dr. Rachel Kermis a family medicine physician at Baton Rouge General Hospital, breaks down the infection and its symptoms.
While the public grapples with an intensifying fifth wave, medical experts are keeping an eye out for another infection, slowly growing more prevalent.
Flurona is when we unfortunately get COVID and the flu together.
It's something that has happened in the past, but not really with the prevalence that we're worried about it happening right now because... Dr. Rachel Kermis , a family medicine physician at Baton Rouge General Hospital, says that Florence isn't a new variant.
Instead, it's two viruses infecting the body at once.
The symptoms of the dual infection take ailments from both diseases.
It's common for people to experience a dry cough, fatigue and shortness of breath from COVID 19, alongside the congestion, runny nose and muscle aches of the flu.
So we do worry about the symptoms potentially being worse because flu obviously is not good by itself.
We've seen that COVID is not very good by itself, either, so hopefully in a healthy individual, some without a lot of comorbidities, it's just a bad respiratory infection, meaning we're going to be on a couch for a few days and have some coffee and hopefully improve over-the-counter medications.
This type of infection, although rare, isn't new.
There have been previous cases of coronaviruses and the flu simultaneously infecting people for years, according to the Atlantic.
A man tested positive for coronavirus and the flu in February 2020, before the public had any concept of COVID 19 .
Since the initial diagnosis, medical experts have noticed an increase in both cases globally, the first of the year was reported in Israel, when doctors diagnosed two pregnant women on January second.
Since then, cases have been reported in Brazil, China and the U.K..
The United States has also reported cases in Houston, Florida and California.
Dr. Kermis says that it's likely cases will start to appear in Louisiana as well.
We were worried about it last year, and that was kind of the big, scary thing.
We were all hoping it wasn't going to happen.
And thankfully, from our masking protocol and a lot tighter isolation rules, we did just not have as much fluid within our community.
Unfortunately, we are seeing more of it now, so there's more potential for people to get both infections at the same time.
The reason this infection seems more common this year is because mandates have been lifted and more people have returned to work.
In 2020, lockdowns and restrictions were put in place to limit COVID spread.
The flu was also limited in the process.
Now that life is returning to a new normal, flu cases are rising.
one of the big things I'm still recommending for people is if you feel sick, please don't go round.
People try to get tested.
I know we are having some access problems with tests, but as the supply chain picks up, we should be able to have more and more testing available while the patient may get symptoms of both viruses.
The overall infection is reported to be mild.
The best protection is still to be vaxxed and boosted.
If you feel like you have symptoms of Flurona, make sure you ask your doctor for both a COVID and an influenza test.
To elaborate floats in two of the nation's biggest parades watched by literally billions of people.
They've drawn rave reviews for Louisiana, a great part of the Louisiana tourism push.
It's like a full court blitz, actually, that they've been doing this past year to try to lure people to come back into the state still in a pandemic and to also do those staycations.
In addition to that, also keeping Louisiana beautiful.
Another part of that?
There's a lot to talk about.
Mardi Gras is here.
But Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser is also here.
So where do you want to start Mardi Gras?
Well, you know.
These two parades for the parades a way to promote and get people excited about coming to Louisiana.
Something thinking outside the box with Mardi Gras right around the corner.
Those billions of people that watched, we're sure many of those are going to be excited about Louisiana, what we have to offer and hopefully book a trip somewhere in Louisiana to Mardi Gras.
Now let me ask you, this was a great idea, but did you ever think that it would get the acclaim, including an award in the tournament of Roses, right?
No.
You know, we it's always a gamble.
We have to make sure the return on investment is there.
So it's always a risk.
But looking at the parade in past years in the viewership and knowing that when we went out there to make the presentation to get added, we talked about putting our best foot forward, a hospital worker or a police officer.
You're a teacher of the year.
We wanted to show all the good Louisiana has to offer and a local boy made it big.
American Idol Laine Hardy, the hot eight brass band.
These performances and all together was our concept of to show all the good for Louisiana.
So when we were accepted then we had to make sure that we got the return on investment.
And it knocked it out.
The park official website also seems to have knocked it out of the park because it seems more thorough, more specific.
It gives specific ideas telling people If you're eating crawfish, don't worry about getting sleep because that's going to happen.
You know, we want to make sure that we're touching people.
Interacting so much is social media.
There's so much out there.
So we've got great partners all over the state in the tourism industry that really have a lot of input in how we put that content out there and how we reach people, interact with them.
And I think that's the future of trying to get people excited about coming to Louisiana.
They want to interact and know they can come here, get their hands dirty and see what Louisiana is really about.
It's one thing to get them here, but when they leave, what are they saying about the state?
And that's for the keeping Louisiana beautiful campaign comes in and you've got something to mention.
Yes, we are.
We last year we were able to get the Legislature to move it under our office.
I've always been passionate about cleaning up Louisiana, and we moved it into my office last year.
We've made some progress, but we've got a long way to go.
And we're going to have a major announcement next week about that.
I can't let the cat out the bag yet, but I'm excited that working as a team, we're going to finally get to clean up Louisiana once and for all so we can be proud coming and leaving the state and everyone else will be.
We do have the best people in the world and when I travel the world, people say, Yes, y'all treat strangers like family.
Yeah, just like that.
So that makes you so proud of Louisiana.
And I want to be proud of the landscape.
We are the sportsman's paradise, so that's why we're excited about that, too.
You know, one of the things that's exciting is that coming up in a little while, we'll talk about this in the future.
Your civil rights markers continue to grow and expand.
Really, as you know, we've we've postponed the one for Friday in Bogalusa because the family of the send is wanted to be there and they're elderly.
We don't want to risk that.
So we're going to push you back a few months.
But as we put those around the state partnered with the other southern states, it's going to bring millions of visitors.
But it's also going to tell a story and recognize some of those families and what they meant to the civil rights movement.
Another great addition.
More tools in our toolbox to promote Louisiana.
I'd like to bring you back here to talk more thoroughly about that.
one thing I don't want to leave out and I touched on it earlier was we're still in a pandemic.
How is how are you coping with that?
Well, you know, we've got to get through it.
I don't believe we can take a setback in shutting down again.
And you know, we promote Mardi Gras all over Louisiana, family friendly, affordable Mardi Gras in every corner of this state.
Before COVID, we saw double digit improvements of people driving in to Shreveport, Huoma, Morgan City to those Mardi Gras celebrations.
Baton Rouge Lafayette.
We believe we can host the parades and do it safely.
And we're hoping to welcome people from all over the world to Mardi Gras this year.
The communities around this state really need that shot in the arm, no pun intended to the economy, the businesses attractions.
We can't afford another setback.
Those businesses won't make it if we don't do everything we can to support them.
Great to have you here.
Always.
Happy New Year!
Appreciate.
Happy New Year!
You will find more information of what's happening throughout Louisiana.
At Louisiana Travel dot com.
Supply chain issues resulting from the pandemic have halted numerous operations, from food distribution to retail shipments, Mardi Gras supplies of the latest casualty, Dana Buehler, an independent Mardi Gras artist, and Stephen Ellis, the Rex Commerce Quartermaster, talk about their struggle to bring Mardi Gras back to life amid a supply chain crisis.
Shipping containers stuck at sea trucks without drivers store shelves empty When the pandemic began in 2020, the world came to a halt.
As we enter a fifth surge, widespread shortages for the global supply chain are still impacting every corner of the country, including south Louisiana, where small businesses are struggling.
In the heart of New Orleans, independent Mardi Gras artists like Dana Bueller are just trying to stay afloat.
I really did my best to get started early.
I always do, but the season always will catch up with you.
And there were things that I waited a really long time for.
Bueller built the iconic Mardi Gras flowers you see in every parade.
She makes headsets for crew members and even builds the sculptures atop some of the floats.
But to do this accurately, she has to have enough time.
I would say if I haven't started on something by September, or if it's not at least on my books or on my radar by September, it's too late.
It's too late, and this year she is cutting it dangerously close.
I mean, there were times when I would drive to Slidell just to pick up a quart if I could find it.
Just to try to keep me going, and there were times when I thought, like, I'm just going to have to shut everything down, I'm going to have to stop taking orders and stop working.
She placed orders for material she needed in June, which is about ten to twelve gallons of glue and 20 to 30 gallons of paint.
Now, glue and paint may seem easy to come by.
But Mardi Gras artists need specific brands that can survive hundreds of hands, grabbing at floats and costumes in the hopes of catching a bead.
These orders were backlogged when a shipping container for months and for a while.
Manufacturers weren't even sure that they could make the materials she needed.
From July to November, it was a game of anticipation.
Patience and perseverance.
I do remember evacuating for IDA and driving all over Houston, just looking for courts and only being able to find like two courts.
And I would be able to find it at certain places and I would crack open the cans and they would all be old old cans, dead cans, unusable because people were like getting the material off the shelf.
It was the last that they had, but it was all old.
So it was it was disheartening.
And I think that's when I started to put out the memo to the other artists that like, Hey, guys, this is the problem.
This is really bad.
I don't know what's going to happen.
Her orders would eventually come in late November, early December, putting her nearly three months behind schedule, and to make matters worse, the inflated price of shipping and panic buying.
Costed Bueller 500 to $1,000 more than her average supply spending.
And she's not the only artist battling the supply chain crisis.
Rex Commerce, one of the oldest parades in New Orleans, is facing it, too.
I was hearing horror stories towards the beginning of last year, even before it made the news.
The people who I worked with for logistics were telling me, it's going to take longer.
It's going to be more expensive.
Stephen Ellis is the quartermaster for the Rex Parade.
His job is to order beads, bags and any other items crew members throw off the float.
Unlike Buehler, Ellis's biggest problem wasn't locating the items he needed.
It was paying for them to get to New Orleans.
We didn't want to take the risk of things getting caught up in, not having our throws here in time.
So we tried to bring a ship directly into New Orleans early to book on a ship that was coming to New Orleans, and that's how we were set up for a while.
That ship ended up getting rerouted and came in to Texas, so then we had to hire a truck to bring our containers from Texas to New Orleans.
The result was a 16,000 dollar price tag for beads and bags that would have normally cost around 4000.
Much of the cost was absorbed by Rex's foundation, but the amount of money was still a shock.
The supply chain crisis is still underway.
In December, John Drake, the vice president for supply chain policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that a wealth of factors are to blame.
Raw materials are scarce right now.
There's a truck driving shortage and factories are closing.
The Biden administration has pledged 230 million in port infrastructure grants and programs to recruit more truck drivers.
Well, with all these changes, it's still likely Americans will feel the shortage further into 2022.
But for artists like Buehler, the worst is almost over.
Buehler is back on schedule for production of her flowers and headdresses.
She says she should be finished before her parades roll, and Rex comments is also on track to finish on time.
You'll be able to see them on Mardi Gras Day.
Yeah, but you know, it's been stressful because you do Mardi Gras because you love it and having all those things not work out on time.
It certainly makes it tough.
Yeah, it's definitely a strain going on.
But here at LPV, we're doing our part to keep the Carnival Spirit alive and well.
We just launched a new social media campaign to encourage vaccinations.
It's called Save Mardi Gras.
2022.
Yeah.
LPB produced an original Mardi Gras inspired song with musician John Gray, and we asked well-known choreographer here in this area of Baton Rouge, Leonard Augustus, to create a special dance.
We've turned it into a Tik Tok video we hope will encourage everyone to get vaxxed and look the good times roll.
Let's take a look.
Hey, Louisiana's.
Come on.
You're not in that.
No, I'm not I would not be able to keep up.
We were not invited.
We're not invited.
We were learning the dance moves, so we were trying.
We're going to practice.
We're going to practice it down.
But like I said, I could not keep up.
Now, if you're like me, I need a little extra help getting those moves down.
We created a tutorial video for the dance that breaks it all down for you.
Post your video on social media, and in a few weeks, we're going to take the best of the best the creme de la creme, and we're going to air that right here.
If you like to learn more.
You can join our Save the Mardi Gras dance challenge, and that's going to be on Tik Tok.
You can head over to lpb.org/Save Mardi Gras, listen to the original music and watch our fun dance to learn the steps and remember the hashtag Save Mardi Gras 2020 to get vaxxed for now.
Yes, indeed.
And on that note, that's our show for this week.
Remember, you can watch anything LPB, anytime, wherever you are with our LPB PBS app.
You can catch LPB news and public affairs shows, as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.
And please like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and possibly TikTok.
So make sure you go to TikTok and do that TikTok challenge right now.
Absolutely for everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
I'm Andre Moreau and I'm Kara St. Cyr.
I got to work on tape.
Yes, we both do.
We both do.
Until next time, everyone, that's the state we're in.
Hey, Louisiana, gras.
Seem.
Entergy is proud to support programing on LP and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.
The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.
Additional support provided by the Fred B. and Ruth B. Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.
The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
With support from viewers like you.