Mississippi is now No. 1 in COVID deaths per 100,000, dethroning NJ

Mississippi now leads the country in COVID-19 deaths per 100,000, usurping New Jersey, a pandemic hotspot which, until last week, held the title for 15 months. Magnolia State claimed the unenviable title after a month in which the wave of delta variants pushed hospitals to the point of collapsing with levels of coronavirus patients at record highs for children and adults .

Mississippi state health official Dr Thomas Dobbs predicted the state would overtake New Jersey earlier this month, shortly after Mississippi passed the country’s first pandemic hotspot, New York, which now ranks third in COVID deaths per 100,000. But that was not to happen, he stressed.

“In Mississippi, we’re just the last, right? And if you see people there, they say it’s inevitable, that people are going to die, it’s not worth trying, ”the public health official said at a roundtable on September 3, 2021, Mississippi State Medical Association. “It’s a loser mentality, isn’t it? “

Since the arrival of COVID-19 in the state of Magnolia in March 2020, the Deaths from COVID-19 per 100,000, also known as the crude death rate, climbed to 306 per 100,000 inhabitants. New Jersey, now in second place, has reported 292 deaths per 100,000 population, while New York, the nation’s first pandemic hotspot, has reported 269 COVID deaths per capita.

These figures are based on crude death rate calculations (that is, using the total number of deaths in each state and data from the 2020 census. Some organizations that track COVID deaths per 100,000, like the New York Times, still show Mississippi slightly behind New Jersey, as they still use older census estimates for these calculations. These older census estimates, however, do not reflect the fact that Mississippi has lost population over the past decade while New Jersey has gained population.

“The power of lies is incredible”

“It’s bad. It doesn’t have to be that way,” Dr. Dobbs said at the MSMA press conference on September 3. “In Mississippi, we shouldn’t be complacent. We have to use our tools. to move forward. And it’s not just in COVID. It’s in all areas of health.

When the Delta Variant surge began in July, the Mississippi ranked No. 2. 50 nationwide in COVID-19 vaccination. Magnolia State has since climbed to 46th place, now leading Alabama, Idaho, West Virginia and Wyoming. About 41% of Mississippians are now fully vaccinated. Nationally, about 55% of Americans are fully immunized.

During the MSMA press conference, Dr Dobbs attributed the reluctance of Mississippians to get vaccinated or take other precautions to the spread of disinformation on social media.

“The power of lies is incredible, and the people who lie when this is all over will pay no price for the lies they spread, will they?” When this is all over, and we do the pickup, every decision that you made, that you made as doctors, will be there, and people who lie will have no consequence for the harm they cause ” , did he declare. “If you are spreading a lie, you are contributing to that lie. I am very attached to this.

The Mississippi State Department of Health today reported 85 more deaths from COVID-19, including, as is often the case, those it has identified in recent weeks that did not had not yet been reported. With today’s report, the state has officially passed 9,000 deaths from COVID-19, with more than 1,000 deaths in the past 22 days alone.

“I would have hoped we would have been Your Neighbor’s State of Love, but we really haven’t embraced that as a philosophy when it comes to spreading COVID,” Dr Dobbs said during the MSMA discussion.

Despite high COVID-19 rates in Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves pledges to join other Republican governors considering suing Biden administration over vaccine or President Joe Biden’s testing tenure for business with more than 100 employees. “It’s still America, and we still believe in the freedom of tyrants”, Reeves tweeted on September 9.

The excess of deaths exceeds 12,000

The real death toll from COVID in Mississippi is almost certainly thousands more than the 9,061 officially confirmed: the MSDH has recorded more than 12,000 additional deaths since spring 2020.

“Excessive deaths” measures the number of additional people who died from all causes in a year compared to the average number of annual deaths in recent years. At a press conference in September 2020, Dr Dobbs said the MSDH “almost certainly underestimates” the deaths due to “conservative” counting procedures.

Between 2017 and 2019, an average of 32,526 Mississippians died each year. This number rose to 40,203 in 2020, or 7,677 additional deaths. Before that, the the worst year for excessive deaths in recorded state history had been 1918, when that number increased to 7,312 during the great influenza pandemic that year.

In the first eight months of 2021, 24,564 Mississippians died compared to an average of 20,229 in an equivalent period in the three years leading up to the pandemic. This brings the excess death toll this year so far to 4,335 lives, and the excess death toll in the pandemic era to over 12,000. Currently available death data only goes to 14 August 2021 and do not yet include deaths from that month.

Mississippi didn’t confirm its first case of COVID-19 until nearly two weeks after the outbreaks in New York and New Jersey began. Like most other governors in the country, Mississippi Governor Reeves has ordered a lockdown with mandatory social distancing, although under pressure to do so. But while New York and other states that were hit hard in the first wave continued to maintain stricter public health measures afterwards, Reeves began easing many measures in May and June 2020.

“We have learned a lot from this first wave. The only thing we have learned is that unlike New York State and New Jersey State, Mississippi has never seen a huge peak, ”Governor Reeves said on May 27. 2020.

At this moment, Mississippi ranks 15th for 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, and New York still ranked No. 1. But from the following month, New Jersey would take the lead as three successive waves of COVID-19, including the current one, hammer Mississippi hard with peaks like the one the Governor Reeves thought his condition had avoided. Meanwhile, the east coast states that had been affected early maintained more restrictions and often experienced less severe outbreaks.

Early 2021, Mississippi Ranked No.8 per 100,000 COVID-19 Deaths after being devastated by the surges of summer and fall 2020.