BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has announced the first winners of its COVID-19 vaccine lottery. But Friday’s celebratory moment of cash and scholarship awards was darkened by the worries caused by a new spike in cases of the coronavirus illness primarily among the unvaccinated. Gov. John Bel Edwards urged his state’s residents to embrace the shots to lessen the impact of the fast-spreading delta variant. Health officials said Louisiana has entered its fourth surge since the coronavirus outbreak began in March 2020. The number of new COVID-19 cases confirmed each day in Louisiana has been rising for the last four weeks. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has more doubled in two weeks.
