Mississippi will not participate in a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, governor says
If there’s a national lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus after President-Elect Joe Biden takes office, Mississippi won’t be participating, Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday afternoon on Facebook Live.
“The fact is, we’re going to try to work with whomever the president is,” he said. “We’re not going to participate in a nationwide lockdown.”
Reeves’s comments came in response to a remark on Wednesday by one of Biden’s coronavirus advisors, Dr. Michael Osterholm, that a lockdown could help the country avoid “COVID hell.”
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
During the campaign, Biden said he wanted to “Shut down the virus, not the country.” It is not yet clear exactly what measures his transition team is strongly considering to address the coronavirus.
Cases are rising across the country, and public health experts say the United States faces the prospect of a devastating winter, as colder weather and holiday gatherings indoors could help the virus spread even faster.
Mississippi is no exception. On Thursday, the state reported another 1,271 new cases. State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs warned that ICU beds around the state were running low. The Coast’s largest hospital, Memorial in Gulfport, was treating 11 COVID-19 patients in the ICU and had just two of its 26 ICU beds open.
Reeves spoke from a desk, apparently alone, rather than in his usual press briefing room, because he and his family are currently isolating after one of his daughters tested positive for COVID-19.
He said Mississippi would continue its strategy of doing “the little things at the margins” to address the virus.
“I’ve been asked, if the legal challenges that are currently being contemplated play out, and the former vice president ultimately becomes the next president, then what is going to change?” he said. “And what I will ell you is, even based upon some of the things that I have heard... from his campaign, I don’t think much of anything’s going to change with respect to the virus.”
Reeves said that Biden, as president, would not have the authority to impose a national lockdown or quarantine; legal experts said as much under Trump.
But just in case, Reeves drew a line in the sand.
“We will certainly fight that if it becomes necessary,” he said of a lockdown. “We as a state are going to continue with our strategy.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 3:31 PM.
