The death of Louisiana congressman-elect Luke Letlow is a reminder that coronavirus isn’t done with us yet.
If you catch COVID-19, you will probably make a full recovery with no lingering health problems. There’s about a four-in-ten chance that you’ll be asymptomatic and not even know you caught it. But there are those rare, tragic, and frightening exceptions, and the late Louisiana congressman-elect Luke Letlow is the latest one.
Letlow, 41, was transferred from St. Francis Medical Center to the Ochsner LSU Health ICU on Dec. 23 and has been treated there since then.
Letlow is survived by his wife, Julia Barnhill Letlow, and two young children — Jeremiah, 3, and Jacqueline, 11 months.
“The family appreciates the numerous prayers and support over the past days but asks for privacy during this difficult and unexpected time,” spokesman Andrew Bautsch said in a statement. “A statement from the family along with funeral arrangements will be announced at a later time.”
LSU Health Shreveport Chancellor G.E. Ghali said Letlow died from a heart attack following a procedure related to the infection.
“It’s devastating to our entire team,” Ghali said.
“He had no underlying conditions,” Ghali said. “It was just COVID.”
Every now and then, as the pandemic wears on, it’s natural to think, “Maybe I should just get it, develop the antibodies, and get it over with, and then I could go on with my life.” Some writers argued that trying to prevent the spread of the virus amounted to “delaying the inevitable.”
The problem is, none of us can know beforehand with certainty how our bodies would respond to an infection. (Although if you have an underlying condition, your odds are probably not better.) If you have a choice between getting COVID-19 and not getting COVID-19, you should always choose not getting it. You can never be 100 percent certain that you’ll be in the category of people who recover just fine. The vaccine is coming; as of this writing, 2.32 million Americans have received their first dose.
Of course, we rarely have much of a choice. The fact that the new, more contagious strain of the virus has been confirmed in Colorado is another serving of ominous news. The “B.1.1.7” variant was found in man in his 20s with no travel history . . . meaning he caught it from someone else in his community.
More contagious doesn’t mean more deadly, and the existing vaccines are believed to work against this variation. But if the B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2 spreads easier and more quickly, it means it will probably be more likely to reach the people whose immune systems can’t fight it off.
Yes, we’re exhausted from it all — the lockdowns, quarantines, and business closures, the ludicrously hypocritical public officials breaking their own edicts, the closed schools, wearing masks, fighting over wearing masks, standing six feet apart, not seeing people in person, and so on. But this country has paid an awful price in this battle so far — more than 346,000 deaths according to Worldometers, 338,000 deaths according to Johns Hopkins University, and 334,000 deaths according to the CDC. Winter is going to keep more Americans indoors, where the virus will spread among households more quickly. We need one or two more months of being really careful, in order to protect the most vulnerable. This doesn’t necessarily justify any particular state’s policy decision; it just means that until you’re vaccinated or your body is generating the antibodies, you’re still vulnerable to having a serious reaction to an infection, or you could unknowingly spread the virus to someone else who is likely to have a serious reaction.
We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re not out of the darkness yet.