Reeves breaks silence and — sort of — agrees with Biden as COVID’s 4th wave rages in MS
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves broke his silence on the state’s skyrocketing COVID-19 cases in a Monday morning tweet.
“It was recently said nationally that the Delta variant was becoming a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated.’ The most recent data from Mississippi suggest the same,” Reeves said.
The governor’s message was accompanied by an earlier tweet from State Medical Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs highlighting how 97% of positive cases in Mississippi from July 9 through Aug. 5 were from unvaccinated individuals. Eighty-nine percent of those hospitalized are unvaccinated, along with 82% of deaths.
Reeves has stayed mostly mum on his social media about coronavirus during the past few weeks of the pandemic’s fourth wave in Mississippi and has deviated significantly with most federal recommendations — he called recent Centers for Disease Control guidance calling for Americans to wear a mask regardless of vaccination status “foolish.”
Without citing President Joe Biden in his assessment of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Reeves acknowledged the trend, which over the weekend left 6,912 Mississippians COVID positive and 28 more people dead from the virus.
Reeves on vaccine choice, masks in school
Reeves, however, highlighted personal choice in his tweet and did not overtly instruct Mississippi residents to get vaccinated.
“Talk to your doctor. Assess the risk. Do the right thing for you. Do the right thing for your family,” he said in the tweet.
Mississippi has one of the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the nation. The state has, along with neighbors Louisiana, Florida and Alabama and Arkansas, the highest rates of infection across the country.
Most of South Mississippi went back to school last week, which will very likely spread the highly transmissible delta variant even further, Dobbs said.
“We are very dismayed, going into school,” Dobbs said in Biloxi last week at a health disparities conference. “We’ve abandoned for most school systems those safety measures. So I don’t know—we have a three times more contagious virus, the majority of kids are not immune because they haven’t had it yet. We’re just going to have a ton of cases.”
Reeves has said repeatedly he will not set a mask mandate for schools. Before the end of last week, almost every district on the Coast planned to make masks optional unless Gov. Tate Reeves reinstated the mask mandate he ordered last year.
Rising COVID numbers made many of those districts change their course — Bay-Waveland, Harrison County and Jackson County are now the only Coast school districts where masks will be optional.
“I would say I’m proud of the school systems that have had the backbone to do mandatory masks for all kids,” Dobbs said at the conference—instructing parents to mask their children and opt-out of school sports and other activities.
“If I were a momma, I would make sure definitely my kids were in a mask, and I wouldn’t put them in any extracurriculars right now, honestly. If I had a kid playing football, I would just say just too bad. Unless you’re vaccinated.”
This project is supported by Journalism and Public Information Fund, a Fund of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
This story was originally published August 9, 2021 at 12:00 AM.
