With no intensive-care beds left in the state, Mississippi reached a new record for patients in an ICU yesterday with 371, surpassing the prior record of 360 set on Jan. 12, 2021.
Mississippi’s COVID-19 crisis is reaching levels beyond anything the state has previously seen, with an onslaught of new cases in virtually every setting. Schools find themselves closing as soon as they open as entire districts see their newly relaxed coronavirus strategies buckling under the weight of the delta variant. Hospitals are faring even worse; as of Monday morning, every single staffed intensive-care unit bed in the state is full.
Two top advocacy groups are accusing Mississippi State Auditor Shad White of misleading Mississippians with a report claiming that up to 5% of Mississippians receiving Medicaid do so fraudulently.
Hinds County Sheriff Lee D. Vance, a four-decade law-enforcement veteran and former chief of the Jackson Police Department, died at his home late Wednesday morning. The Hinds County Sheriff’s Office announced the news on social media, explaining that emergency response found Vance unresponsive. Vance was 63.
The Centers for Disease Control issued a last minute eviction moratorium Tuesday evening, temporarily staving off an immense surge in evictions in the middle of one of the worst waves of coronavirus the U.S. has seen thus far. While the moratorium is targeted only at areas of “substantial or high spread” of the virus, Mississippi’s dangerously climbing infections have put every county in the state in one of those categories, firmly halting all evictions until transmission declines precipitously and remains low, or until Oct. 3.
State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs’ message is, as it so often has been, remarkably simple. Delta is different, categorically more virulent than any strain of COVID-19 that Mississippi has faced thus far.
After just over a week of classes, students at Oak Grove Middle School will go all-virtual until Aug. 16 starting Tuesday amid widespread outbreaks of COVID-19.
The Mississippi State Department of Health is reporting the highest weekend toll for new COVID-19 cases since the pandemic’s deadly winter surge.
Only days into the semester, some school districts in South Mississippi are walking back their decision to make masking optional. Yesterday, the Lamar County School District announced that two of its schools, Oak Grove High School and Purvis High School, were shutting their doors on Monday and going all-virtual until Aug. 16 “due to the high transmission rate of COVID-19.”
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