BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — We are entering our second holiday season during the pandemic, and while the positive cases are declining, some wonder if family gatherings and travel will affect the good progress we’ve seen lately.

JMC Analyst John Couvillon has been crunching the numbers and tracking COVID-19 data from the very beginning.

“The way I look at the Coronavirus is that, it certainly is brutal and that you can never be too complacent, but I think there are some statistics to help put this all in perspective,” Couvillon said.

Last year’s COVID-19 cases spiked after the holidays which led to an increase in hospitalizations and deaths across the U.S.

“If we go back in time to November 18th of 2020, zero percent of us were vaccinated and we had 886 people in the hospital and we had eight percent positive cases,” Couvillon recalls.

Couvillon predicts that this year is looking a little brighter.

“I mean we can’t 100 percent predict the future, but I do feel we are in a better position than we were a year ago,” Couvillon said.

Couvillon owes a lot of this to the vaccine.

“The fact that 48 percent of us are vaccinated when zero percent were a year ago and I am watching for any kinds of outbreaks. Currently, I’m feeling really good about what I see,” Couvillon explained.

We are still in a pandemic… but hopefully, we can enter this holiday season a little more comfortably.

“So even though there is the possibility of cases increasing as we go into the holiday months, we are already at the beginning of the holiday month and our hospitalizations and percent positives are much better than they were a year ago,” Couvillon said.

The state department of health said there are currently nearly 450 COVID-19 positive cases, which is roughly 80 percent fewer compared to last year.