‘The killing times.’ Vicksburg doctor shares what COVID peak was like to warn Mississippians
As Mississippi moves toward a “rough few weeks” of COVID-19 case surges, state medical professionals brace themselves for a repeat of the pandemic’s darkest moments.
The state on Monday recorded its highest one-day figure since January, and it’s the first time new cases have been over 1,000 since February.
On a Tuesday press call, a doctor at a Vicksburg hospital, Dr. Dan Edney, recounted some harrowing moments from the pandemic’s peak last winter, in anticipation of upcoming pressure on the state’s health care systems.
“As I think back over the last year, some of the most difficult days I’ve had in the practice of medicine have been in the midst of getting through late November, December and January earlier this year,” said Edney, who recently joined the Mississippi State Department of Health as chief medical officer for the central region.
“Many times in our practices, we call those ‘the killing times’ because that’s when we were just seeing the virus attacking families wholesale.”
The Department of Health reported 573 more cases on Tuesday, up from 2,326 recorded positives on Monday.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said on the press call that 13 Mississippi hospitals have zero open intensive care unit beds, and significantly more have less than 10% availability.
On Jan. 8, the state peaked at 5,430 COVID cases in a single day.
Edney said he remembers a day during the winter when two of his patients waited five hours waiting in the back of ambulances to get into a hospital emergency room. When they finally got into the ER, patients then waited days before getting into a hospital room.
“There were no ICU beds,” Edney said. “Most of the public don’t really understand how close we came that second week of January to our health care system just breaking from the stress that we were under.”
When vaccinations became available to the state in March, health care systems were able to better manage plummeting COVID numbers.
“Thankfully, vaccines arrived. And as soon as we started to pour the vaccines to the general public, the numbers seemed to calm down, and the stress started to be relieved off of our health care systems,” he said.
The upcoming surge is preventable, Edney and Dobbs said, because now the coronavirus vaccine is available. However, Mississippi remains only 33% vaccinated as the more transmissible delta variant leads in case counts.
Dobbs said on Tuesday’s call that 93% of the state’s positive COVID cases and 89% of deaths over the past month were in unvaccinated residents. Nearly all of the state’s positive numbers are of the delta strain, he said.
“Now we’re dealing with the variant of COVID that is twice as contagious as what we were dealing with before. We just don’t need to go through this again.
“I had an employee in clinic who teared up and told me, ‘I can’t go through this again.’ And we have an answer so that we don’t have to go through those ‘killing times’ again. And that’s vaccination. It’s very simple.”
Edney suggested that local physicians take the lead in curbing vaccine hesitancy in their communities.
“We’re having to convince people basically one at a time that the vaccines are safe and highly effective,” he said. “We know the number one individual that can do that is a patient’s personal physician or provider. And we need these conversations to be held at the time of office visits.
“Physicians matter, and they desperately matter in this situation and with vaccine hesitancy.”
As a local physician, Edney said that he’s been able to persuade a number of his patients to get the shot.
“I’ve seen in my practice that patients oftentimes need to talk to me. They don’t know who Dr. Fauci is, they don’t know who the talking heads are on television, but they know who I am and they know that I’ve been with them for 30 years and they know if I’m vaccinated and my family’s vaccinated and I want them to be vaccinated, they can trust me. And many have chosen to get vaccinated after talking with me.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
