Greg Michel knew what was coming — and yet, he didn’t really know what was coming.
Late in 2019, the McComb native then in charge of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency received a phone call from Greene County’s emergency management director.
“He said, ‘I’ve been hearing all these things and checking on them, and it’s going to be bad,’ ” Michel said Tuesday to the McComb Lions Club. “He went into all this stuff, and my mind was just spinning. I didn’t really know him then, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
“He kept talking about this thing in China and how it was coming this way, and of course, it did.”
That was Michel’s introduction to what everybody now knows as the COVID-19 pandemic, which Mississippi officially joined with its first COVID diagnosis on March 11, 2020, in Forrest County.
Michel and Mississippi were soon thrown into negotiating for supplies and finding sources for things like personal protective equipment.
“Some of the things I did then, if I did it now I’d be thrown in jail for misappropriation of state funds,” Michel said. “But it was necessary then in order to get the things we needed.”
He described some officials or business people in the country who had to grease the right palms in China to get PPE and other necessary products shipped to the U.S. Buyers had to be ready to take possession of their purchases or risk them being stolen.
Mississippi and other jurisdictions often had to deal with brokers to get products where they were needed.
“There’s a lot of millionaires and billionaires walking around who made their money on this pandemic,” he said.
Michel, like millions of other Americans, had his own bout with COVID-19. He sought treatment from the doctor of his friend in Greene County, with iffy results.
When he got his first call from Greene County, the emergency management director mentioned ivermectin as a possible treatment long before it entered the public consciousness.
However, a course of the controversial treatment, which has had little to no confirmation of effectiveness in scientific studies, and vitamins did not put Michel right in the three days he was told to expect.
Instead, he said he felt “worse and worse” as days passed, and ended up spending a number of days in Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center.
“I got everything but a ventilator,” Michel said. “I asked my doctor what he’d given me, and he said my viral load was so heavy, they had to throw everything they had at me.”
Michel, who served from 2018 to January 2021, led MEMA not just through COVID, but through a number of tornadoes — including several that inflicted heavy damage in Pike, Amite and Walthall counties — and Hurricane Ida.
“Most counties don’t know how to work with the federal government to get the help they need after a disaster and get their money,” Michel said. “We tried to help the counties all we could.”
Heading MEMA was a job Michel didn’t seek and didn’t think he wanted, he said, but one that he grew to appreciate.
“It was a humbing experience,” he said.
