COVID-19 has killed more Mississippians than the great flu

More Mississippians have now died from COVID-19 than have died during the entire great flu pandemic that lasted from 1918 to 1919.

The Mississippi State Department of Health reports that it has now confirmed at least 9,270 coronavirus deaths in the state since the novel coronavirus arrived in the spring of 2020. During the influenza pandemic a century ago , the state has reported 9,234 deaths.

Data from the Mississippi State Department of Health suggests the actual death toll from COVID-19 could be thousands more due to unconfirmed pandemic deaths. The state has reported more than 12,400 additional deaths since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The milestone comes a day after Gov. Tate Reeves defended his handling of COVID-19 in an appearance on CNN while also attacking President Joe Biden for mandating vaccines for companies with more than 100 employees.

“What we should be talking about is, what can we do to minimize deaths in the future?” Reeves said. “The president is not focused on saving lives. The president has focused on taking unilateral action to show, to show his power, to show that he is doing something, but that will not solve things.

Nationally, the official number of nationally reported COVID-19 deaths is also close to the CDC’s estimate of 675,000 deaths of Americans during the great influenza pandemic. Since 1920, however, the U.S. population has tripled from 106 million to about 331 million in 2020.

But Mississippi’s population has only grown by a third since the great influenza pandemic, also known as the “Spanish flu” (although this virus probably did not originate in Spain).

During the pandemic of a century ago, about 486 out of 100,000 Mississippi residents died from the flu. In the current pandemic, so far, 313 out of 100,000 Mississippians have died, but that number continues to rise every day. However, it does not include more than 3,000 additional deaths that could still potentially be attributed to COVID-19.

The Mississippi Free Press broke the news last week, Magnolia state claimed the highest death toll from COVID-19 in the country after passing the first pandemic hotspots in New York and New Jersey. If Mississippi were a country, the state would also have the second-worst COVID-19 death rate in the world behind Peru. Tapper noted these statistics during Governor Reeves’ appearance on Sunday.

“Governor, if Mississippi were a country, you would have the second worst per capita death toll in the world,” Tapper said. “And I say, are you going to do anything to try and change that?” “

The governor, who has refused to implement a mask mandate in schools and opposed other mitigation efforts, has offered no ideas to change his policies.

“Jake, as I mentioned earlier, fatalities, unfortunately, are a lagging indicator. … When you wanted me to come three or four weeks ago, you wanted to talk about our case count, ”Reeves said. “And then you want to talk about our hospitalizations. Now you want to talk about a lagging indicator, which is sad.

“I’m trying to talk about the deaths in Mississippi, that’s what I’m trying to talk about,” Tapper said.

Last week, Biden singled out Reeves in a speech after the governor of Mississippi called the employer’s vaccine presidential mandate a “tyrannical-type move.”

“In Mississippi, children need to be immunized against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis B, polio, tetanus and more,” Biden said.

The president was referring to the state’s requirements for childhood vaccines to attend public schools. Unlike other states, Mississippi does not allow religious exemptions for childhood vaccinations and rare exemptions must be granted by county health officials. The strict diet has enabled Mississippi to have the nation’s highest childhood immunization rate for non-COVID childhood illnesses.

“These are state requirements. But in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed more than 660,000 lives, I am proposing a requirement for COVID vaccines and the governor of this state calls it, and I quote, “a tyrannical type movement?” It’s the worst kind of politics, ”Biden said on September 16. “Because it endangers the lives of the citizens of their states, especially children, and I refuse to give in to it.