‘Don’t get complacent.’ MS docs who predicted delta surge say more vaccine takers needed
Take the Mississippi State Department of Health’s advice to continue getting vaccinated seriously, top health officials say, because their predictions ahead of August’s deadly delta wave came to pass.
Mississippi is now ranked first in the country in COVID deaths per capita and saw over 1,000 deaths from COVID in August, MSDH officials said during a Thursday press conference — grave benchmarks they forecasted earlier this summer.
Now that the state is seeing slight decreases in COVID cases and deaths, the same officials warn residents to continue increasing immunization from the deadly virus by getting vaccinated or, after a positive test, monoclonal antibodies.
“If you think back to the end of July and earlier, we said, “We’re going to lose a thousand folks in August unless we do something different. And we didn’t do enough different,” said State Medical Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs.
MSDH reported over 1,000 deaths in August. The state has already seen 757 deaths in September.
“We suffered through it. We predicted that we’d be number one for mortality. It’s not that there is no hard statistics to figure out when things aren’t going to go well. We still have far too many people in Mississippi who are not immune,” he said.
“The place where we are is not inevitable, the place where we go is not inevitable.”
On Thursday MSDH reported 2,594 more cases of COVID-19 in Mississippi and 65 deaths, which is trending with a slight decline from numbers the state saw in August.
“That’s become more of the norm recently... It certainly looks like our cases are coming down,” said State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers, noting that the state’s seven-day average is at the same point as last winter’s surge peak, however.
“We’re still in the thick of it guys...We’re still at very high levels of cases, hospitalizations, deaths, unfortunately. We’ve had almost 20,000 cases that have been reported this month alone, and we’re just still halfway through the month. So we anticipate that those are going to increase at the levels of daily case reports,” he said.
“Let’s just continue the progress that we’ve made. Let’s don’t get complacent.”
There is some more hospital bed availability around the state, said Jim Craig, senior deputy for the Mississippi Department of Health, though ICU capacity continues to be limited.
“At eight-o’clock this morning, critical care hospitals reported that 37 ICU beds were available with 151 patients being held in emergency rooms. Of those 151 being cared for in emergency rooms, 71 patients are waiting on an ICU bed. Of those 71, six are COVID patients,” he said.
“With patients still waiting on ICU beds, our ICU capacity still remains effectively zero in the state.”
Craig also said the health department’s system of care order, which includes rotating new critical care patients between hospitals and delay elective surgeries such as colonoscopies and orthopedic procedures, was on Thursday extended.
This comes as Gov. Tate Reeves announced last Friday that extended for 30 more days the State of Emergency order to ensure resources are available in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article and live event is supported by the Journalism and Public Information Fund, a fund of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
