With more younger Mississippians becoming infected with COVID-19 and the strain on the state’s health care system continuing, Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday that school districts need to get creative with a focus on safely teaching children.
Reeves also hinted the list of 23 counties under his executive order that brings new public health restrictions is likely to grow, and he’ll likely have restraints for bars.
The governor addressed the shift in the demographics of people being infected with the virus, with children under 18 seeing vastly higher infections recently.
Reeves said infection rates for school-aged children have increased recently, which is a terrible development as schools prepare to reopen in the fall.
Schools will have to be “innovative” to continue teaching, Reeves said, noting that the Mississippi Department of Education has guidelines to help school districts.
He said if children do not get back to learning by the fall, there could be irreversible damage to their education.
“We can’t have that happen,” he said.
Reeves said Mississippians can expect a statewide executive order restricting bars in the wake of increased cases among those aged 18 to 29, which recently has had the most infections in the state.
“When we look at that we have to make determinations as to why those two groups are the fastest growing and what we can do to curb it,” he said. “We are having a more difficult time to convince the younger people.
“We don’t want to do that but we certainly want to make following the executive orders easier to follow.”
Reeves said he would add more counties to his executive order mandating masks today.
“I don’t think we will be taking anyone else off this week. We will wait another week before we do that,” he said.
While he insisted the restrictions have helped curb the spread, Reeves said it is not the “words on the paper” that did that, but local leaders buying into it.
“There are counties that we have put restrictions ... on that are at least seeing a flattening,” he said.
And while the survival rate of the virus is extremely high and younger people have a much better chance of getting over it than those over the age of 70, Reeves said that does not discount the need to stop the spread of the virus.
“So many want to talk about survival rate. … We all know the survival rate for this virus is certainly better than it looked early on, but the survival rate is certainly worse than the common cold,” he said.
He said younger, healthier people are more likely to spread it to their parents and grandparents, which would be more deadly for them, and with so many hospitalized patients, the strain on the system makes healthcare for the general population much harder.
“As state leaders, we have to do everything we can to protect the integrity of our healthcare system so every Mississippian can get quality healthcare,” he said.
Reeves said low mortality rates do not change the fact that people are dying and every death is one too many.
“Doing nothing is simply not an option. We can do simple things that are a pain. I don’t like wearing a mask ... but we know that it works,” he said.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs agreed.
“We can prevent every single one of those deaths, we just choose not to,” he said.
Dobbs said another reason the virus is becoming so out of control is that people want to go back to normal, noting that people want to go out and “play baseball and visit Grandma.” He said if Mississippians could keep themselves away from others for two weeks, the virus would be under control again.
Dobbs also tackled the myth that increased testing results in an increase in positive results. He said if the state increased testing but the infection rate stayed the same, then there would be a drop in the amount of positive cases.
State health officials said Pike County added 15 cases on Thursday for a total of 664 since March and had one of the 13 new deaths reported in the state.
The state confirmed 982 new cases on Thursday.
“It is kind of shocking when that looks like a good number,” Dobbs said.
Since March, 48,053 cases and 1,436 deaths have been identified in the state.
In other daily virus numbers Thursday, Lincoln County rose by 18 cases to 640, Amite County added five for a total of 156, Franklin rose by one for a total of 79, Lawrence went up by 13 and stands at 235, Walthall County added five for a total of 378 and Wilkinson rose by three for a total of 137.
