‘If we’re not careful, Mississippi is gonna look like New York,’ health officials warn
A record number of COVID-19 cases on Thursday, which shattered the previous day’s record by 78.7%, prompted the state’s top health officers to hold an impromptu news conference broadcast on Facebook Live.
“The truth is, there’s a lot of COVID out there,” State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said. “It’s going to kill a lot of people and it’s going to over-stress our health care system. That’s the reality.”
The Mississippi State Department of Health reported 1,092 new coronavirus cases Thursday, up from a record 611 on Wednesday. A total of 1,016 people have died.
Dobbs said he had been worried only a few weeks ago about hospitals being overcrowded in the fall because of a coronavirus resurgence.
Now, he’s concerned the healthcare system might be overrun next week.
He mentioned a person with a broken leg over the weekend who couldn’t get into a hospital anywhere because beds were full.
“We’ve had people spending overnight and days in the ER like it’s an ICU,” Dobbs said.
“If we’re not careful, Mississippi is gonna look like New York.”
State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers joined Dobbs at the news conference. Asked how Mississippi could correct the sudden worrying spike in cases, he said, “It’s gonna be like turning around the Titanic.”
Gov. Tate Reeves also held a last-minute press conference after Dobbs and Byers, echoing what they said.
“These numbers, they’re not because of increased testing,” Reeves said. Testing has been relatively stable over the past two months, Dobbs and Byers said, and the vast majority of the 1,092 cases reported today occurred over the past week.
“The reality is that these 1,000 cases are not tied to any one particular event,” Byers said. “They are not tied to one particular county. We are seeing community transmission throughout Mississippi.”
Cases are rising fastest among 18- to 29-year-olds.
“They’re in places like Oxford, they’re in places like DeSoto County, they’re in places like the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Reeves said, “where there are a lot of young people who are going out, they’re partying, they’re having a great time, and they’re getting sick.”
People are not wearing masks or social distancing and are gathering in large groups, the public health experts said.
“This reckless social behavior is going to harm the whole state,” Dobbs said. “It’s going to harm businesses, it’s going to harm the economy and it’s going to cause more deaths.”
Dobbs said most young people will recover if they catch coronavirus, but their older relatives may not.
“There’s been this mad rush to get back to normal,” Dobbs said. “People are fixated on things that are not essential to life.”
He implored community and business leaders to set an example by following public health guidelines.
Unless Mississippians do simple things to contain the virus, Dobbs and Byers said, case numbers will only continue to grow and hospitals won’t have enough medical staff to treat the sick.
Standing up a hospital at Camp Shelby is “a fallacy,” Dobbs said, because there are not enough health-care workers to staff one. He said hospitals do have some capacity to expand space in-house.
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 6:17 PM.
