‘I’m Seeing Healthy People Die Every Day’: COVID Spirals in Mississippi
Coroners in a state facing an unprecedented hospitalization crisis say the dead increasingly have two things in common.
On Monday, Aug. 2, a 34-year-old woman in Gulfport, Mississippi, started feeling dizzy at work. She tested positive for COVID-19 a few days after that.
By the next Sunday, she was dead. Her husband, also in his mid-thirties, died from coronavirus this past Saturday, according to Brian Switzer, the local coroner.
“These are deaths I wouldn’t have seen a month or two ago,” Switzer, the Harrison County Coroner, told The Daily Beast. “I’m seeing significantly younger folks this time around, but there’s still this idea that if you’re young and don’t have comorbidities, you’re not going to die.”
But as the Delta variant pushes the state’s entire health-care system to the brink of collapse, those coming face-to-face with COVID’s victims say the virus’ target has changed dramatically, from older to younger Mississippians—often healthy, and virtually always unvaccinated.
“We’re seeing more and more deaths in younger age groups,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs told reporters last week. “And there’s a very simple reason for that. And that’s because the vast majority of our 65-plus group have been [vaccinated]” while, he said, the rate among younger Mississippians is far lower.
Although Mississippi currently has a vaccination rate of 36 percent, the second-lowest in the country, among Mississippians over 65, the vaccination rate is more than 70 percent, according to the state Department of Health. Among those in their forties, the vaccination rate was 38 percent, while fewer than a quarter of Mississippians in their twenties and thirties had been fully vaccinated as of last week.
In the first 15 days of August, more than 45,000 Mississippians tested positive for coronavirus, according to data from the Department of Health. Just 10 percent of those diagnosed were over the age of 65. Nearly 75 percent were under the age of 50. That age group also accounts for more than half of the record-high number of hospitalizations in Mississippi. And as of Monday, 22 pediatric COVID patients were hospitalized at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, with the facility indicating in a news item that “the beds are full.”
“So we’ve got a lot more tragedy on the way. It’s very distressing,” Dobbs said.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/coroners-say-covid-19-is-spiraling-in-mississippi-and-younger-unvaccinated-people-are-the-ones-dying?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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