3 YEARS LATER: Mississippi’s first COVID-19 case, and where we’ve been

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – This weekend marks the third anniversary of Mississippi’s first COVID-19 case. Let’s have a look again at what’s occurred and see the place we’re headed.

MARCH 2020: “Now we’ve recognized our first case of COVID-19 in Mississippi,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers stated.

That assertion got here to you precisely three years in the past this weekend, the day the COVID-19 pandemic got here to the Magnolia State.

Dr. Michael Threlkeld, an Infectious Illness Specialist with Baptist Memorial Hospital, says specialists had no concept what was coming.

“After we heard concerning the first few circumstances, all of us stated, ‘Wow, that’s fascinating. I ponder if that’ll quantity to something.’ [We] by no means thought that, you recognize, three years later, we’d be nonetheless sitting right here speaking about it,” Dr. Threlkeld defined.

In a matter of simply days, Governor Tate Reeves declared a Public Well being Emergency, colleges pivoted to digital studying, and the virus claimed the state’s first sufferer.

In April 2020, Gov. Reeves issued a “shelter-in-place” order to maintain circumstances from rising additional.

APRIL 2020: “We’re near our peak useful resource use. The very best knowledge exhibits it’s coming within the subsequent couple of weeks. Extra Mississippians will die from this. It’s critical, contagious, and it may be deadly,” Gov. Reeves stated.

In the summertime months, restrictions had been lifted, leaving hospitals to request outdoors assist and create ICUs in parking garages.

“The sheer variety of actually sick sufferers filling up the Intensive Care Items, to the place, you recognize, half to two-thirds to three-fourths of your Intensive Care Unit was made up of critically in poor health COVID sufferers and didn’t depart room for anyone else,” Dr. Threlkeld stated.

As of December 30, Former State Well being Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs reported 346 COVID sufferers within the ICU, together with 5 youngsters, and 219 COVID sufferers on ventilators.

Then, well being officers started rolling out the vaccine.

JAN 2021: “Subsequent week, we are going to begin once more with a major rise. My purpose within the month of February is to have the flexibility to do roughly 100,000 vaccines per week,” Gov. Reeves stated.

However many Mississippians had been hesitant to roll up their sleeves.

“If this epidemic occurred 20 years in the past, we wouldn’t have had a vaccine like this available in a remarkably brief time period. Folks at all times say, ‘Oh, the vaccine got here out too shortly.’ And my response is, ‘Yeah, that’s good,” Dr. Threlkeld stated.

In the meantime, the virus started forming variants like Delta and Omicron, resulting in the very best variety of circumstances in January 2022 with over 10,000.

“The virus has been smarter than we thought and was capable of mutate and overcome our immune system. So we nonetheless haven’t seen the tip of that. I believe we noticed these bumps, and people had been the putting adjustments, however the virus is constant to vary and adapt,” Dr. Threlkeld defined.

Since then, the variety of circumstances hasn’t surpassed 3,000 in a day. Regardless of all we overcame, Dr. Threlkeld stated it’s put us in a superb place for the longer term.

“Going ahead, I believe we’d discovered rather a lot, notably about find out how to make vaccines [and] find out how to take care of crises like this, which I believe will maintain us in good stead if we’ve got one other epidemic of one thing else,” Dr. Threlkeld stated.

MARCH 2023: On the third anniversary of the primary COVID-19 case, MSDH shares the overall variety of circumstances and deaths the state has seen. 990,756 whole circumstances and 13,370 whole MS deaths.

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