Jackson Jambalaya

That doesn’t sound like a plausible number. Are they trying to make people question all their reported cases? Follow the $$$$$$$.

I'll believe it when the numbers fall for the first few days of this week and the hospitalizations drop significantly. Tate was complaining a couple of weeks ago about the number of tests affecting the number of positive results. Our positivity rate was over 20% just a week ago. There is no way for positive cases to fall that much without it being a result of a lower number of tests.

Will we see another situation like we had a while back with a huge spike as a couple of labs clear out their backlog? Probably. Combine that with a huge ramp-up in testing now that schools have opened as just one sick kid results in 25 classmates, a teacher, and a bus driver all being tested. I think cases are going to go up quickly.

It would be wonderful if Tate's mask mandate is the cause of this. We'll just have to wait about a week until the positivity rate can be determined and if it has fallen from 20% to 5% which is what such a dramatic decrease seems to imply.

I truly hope things are improving and these are correct numbers.

In a few weeks, we will see if students returning to campuses will change things. However, according to Tate on "Face the Nation", we have nothing to worry about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFU2hfiGBfs

That's why I ignore the positivity rate and look at Rt.

Our numbers are in line with the Rt value. It fell below 1.0 several weeks ago. Now the numbers are starting to get better.

This situation is an exact parallel to that of our college classrooms: Zero adults in charge.

Two weeks..just give me two more weeks..trust me..I swear I love the people of Mississippi..the patchwork of counties where I'm requiring masks is for your own good..my only concern is your health and safety..please be safe and follow my guidelines..if your soused in a bar, be sure you're seated or you can't order another Jack and Coke..and only two fans per participant at ALL high school sporting events..did I already say 'trust me'?

Keep em high until near the end of winter 2021. Not enough infected. Just trying to help out our maskers.

University of North Carolina just shut down on campus classes a week after opening. Will go online. Essentially telling students to leave campus. Wonder how many others will do the same.

Pretty stoked. My wife and I took our kids to a local urgent care clinic and got the antibody test. Just got our results and we have all been infected with Covid-19 despite taking all precautions such as mask wearing and hand sanitizing.

With that said we never even noticed the infection. Apparently our immune systems kicked the infections ass. I told my wife it was probably because we stopped eating all fast food and eliminated as much agricorp processed food with Monsanto GMO corn and soy as we possibly could.

@2:19 It is possible because we're following the same pattern as most every other state/country has with this virus. It's highly unlikely there will be a spike from the schools. You can look back at the story Kingfish shared last Wednesday about the study from Britain.
It was definitely Tate's mask mandate, unlike the mask mandates (with almost 100% compliance) in the Philippines and Hawaii where they're starting to have their spikes in cases now...

Just moved my son into his school apt down at Southern and my daughter into Hinds. Both will be doing on line from their rooms until after New Years. Go on break near Thanksgiving and do not go back to school until January.

#3 Leading cause of death in US in less than 6 months. Nothingburger.

“It is what it is.”

The numbers at the MDH website are the *reported* numbers. There is nothing sinister about it, it's just what's reported "up the chain of command." Testing is backlogged around the country, and fewer people are getting tested, so the number of positive tests reported will go down. That doesn't mean the number of cases in the state have gone down (or up), but over 7-10 days it will almost certainly indicate the trend, up or down. And Kingfish mentioned, weekend numbers tend to show a drop in both reporting and test results. That happens across the US (and across much of the world).

Notice that on Saturday there was a large jump in "suspected cases" in the hospitals with a drop in confirmed cases. Although it won't give an absolutely precise number, add the two for a better picture because while not all suspected cases will come back positive, most will be confirmed.

All of the numbers, as well as other factors, have to considered as parts of the whole picture but for the average person trying to truly understand the situation, look at the 7 day average of reported positives along with the number of tests and the hospital numbers. Note that those must looked at as bands or ranges, i.e., a drop or rise by a relatively small number doesn't really mean much in broad terms. And it is very important to realize that all of the numbers, ranges, and averages are "past history," not a prediction of the future. It shows what the situation was in the last week or two, not an absolute of what it will be in the next two weeks.

The one very bright spot is that the transmission rate is trending downward and that is great. That is somewhat tempered by the slowdown in activity that commonly occurs at the end of summer as families settle down for the school to start, etc. The next couple of weeks and the Labor Day weekend will be crucial for the US. If we can get through mid-September with a continued downtrend, that will be very good and welcome news.

Lastly, the "Rt number" isn't really a number per se, it is the result of assumptions plugged into a non-standardized calculation. Anyone could come up with their own "Rt number" and every one would be different. And just as meaningless to virus science and medicine.

I don't care about Rt or 'cases'. A positive test does not equal illness. Hospitalizations, ICU's, and deaths are the key numbers. All are falling. The panic is over.

Good news for good people.

Should this trend continue, I really hope Dobbs can calm down, get a haircut . . . and take a few days off.

5:50PM said, "I don't care about Rt or 'cases'. A positive test does not equal illness. Hospitalizations, ICU's, and deaths are the key numbers."

Yes, a positive test does equal illness. You are confusing "symptoms" with "illness." And while hospital numbers and deaths are important numbers, they are not "the key" numbers. Like many people you completely misunderstand the situation. It is not a binary - fine or dead. Even those not immediately hospitalized often show indications of further medical issues. Until this thing has been around for at least 12 months or so, we won't have any solid data on longer-term effects. Combine that with a highly uncertain immunity picture and the upcoming winter in the northern hemisphere and this isn't over by a long shot.

If you're looking for binaries, here's one for you: you can either be a willfully ignorant asshole and refuse to wear a mask in public, refuse to practice distancing, and be a part of the problem or you can do otherwise and be a part of the solution. There is no in-between on that.

5:50 They've fallen by a whole 5% in the last three weeks after rising 100% just during the month of July. I hardly think that means the crisis is over. Give me a call when we get back to 400 in the hospital and a seven day average of under 10 deaths per day.

There is no reason to think Mississippi is exceptional and every reason to think we are much worse than average. We will not be spared the same fate everyone else has been facing as schools have reopened and kids have spread the virus among the community. We'll see schools closing before Labor Day and others that were planning on reopening just go ahead with remote learning. We're too stupid to do what it takes to get any measure of control over the virus.

I disagree about Dobbs needing his hairs cut. Gurl, he is fine with those long locks. I get lost at his pressers gazing into those eyes. Did the numbers go up or down today? I couldn’t tell you.

"I told my wife it was probably because we stopped eating all fast food and eliminated as much agricorp processed food with Monsanto GMO corn and soy as we possibly could."

Did you factor in the amount of Kool Aid you've obviously been drinking?

Washington Post has Mississippi seventh in the nation for infection rate and third for mortality using the past week's numbers. We're doing better than when we held the #1 spot in both measures, but we are still much, much worse than average.

We've still got a long way to go, and the smart money says the numbers today will be nowhere near as good as they were for the past two weekend reports. Wonder when MSDH will start reporting school outbreaks and quarantines.

"Wonder when MSDH will start reporting school outbreaks and quarantines."

If you mean on the website, I don't know, but if you mean letting folks know the numbers, those are already being announced. As of this weekend, school districts in 71 counties have reported coronavirus cases, 245 cases among teachers, 199 among students, and 2,035 students and 589 teachers are reported as under quarantine. Keep in mind that just like *reported* positives and hospital numbers all MDH can do is report the total of what the districts report to it and all the districts can report are the numbers they know about. It does not mean that there are only 199 infected students or only 245 infected teachers in Mississippi, it means there are *at least* that many.

@8:22

You are confusing "symptoms" with "illness."

If you insist that a positive test means illness, then you'd have to admit that all illnesses are not the same. There is a high prevalence of very slight and mild illnesses with the wuflu. We've heard many instances of those who contract the 'illness' and never know that they were 'ill'.

As for your claim that "those not immediately hospitalized often show indications of further medical issues", it'd be nice to see some definitive numbers. Again, we've all seen many cases where that is not the case.

While I don't dispute that a few high-risk people will in fact become very ill and a number of them die from this, this country has lost all sense of proportion as to how to deal with risk. If you suggest that masks, distancing, and shelter in place is the answer for this flu, I assume you would advocate the same for all other viruses, past and present.

Now out of ALL these cases reported in schools....

how many kids are actually going to the hospital, ICUs, or heaven forbid, dying?

KF, the real question is how many kids' parents & grandparents are going to go to the hospital, ICU, or die once they bring it back into the household? The theory is kids, particularly really young ones, don't spread the disease as readily as adults. However, there is plenty of evidence that kids can and do spread the disease as you see outbreaks directly tied to parties and gatherings of high-school and college age students.

I suspect we'll see an increase in community spread and severe illnesses once we have time for second and third tier infections to become evident in a few weeks.

KF...few children have ever been expected to die...but they sadly have during this pandemic. None of the youngest here yet, thank God.

The long term effects in every age group won't be known for sometime.

There's is no theory under which a few days or even two weeks of lower cases or deaths or rt factors means anything.

The school effect hasn't had time to play out. It will. Just as did Mother's Day and Memorial Day. And, again we'll get back to school coupled with Labor Day.

There is a wide berth between hysteria and denial. It's called being rational and objective.

In that space, you do the best you can to mitigate damages with the best information available from the most knowledgeable sources available.

With an unknown virus, mistakes will happen as information is not vast, but good grief, the politicizing of this needs to stop. This is a novel virus , not the first virus in history. It's uniquely spreadable.

And, while you might not like that schools that opened have shut down ( even here) and now a university that has a teaching hospital and was extremely well prepared ( including a dorm set up for students testing positive so they could quarantine and more testing that common anywhere except maybe inside the White House fence) had the reopening get quickly out of hand.

If our population had been less accustomed to near instant gratification, we might have been patient enough to let science catch up. I would be extremely optimistic that the saliva tests could actually serve to get this under control if only there were not so many of us who won't cooperate with anything or anybody much less being quarantine if found positive.

The real pity is that if we had not politicized a virus, we might be more like other nations and if we'd been really smart and sophisticated, like New Zealand, be back to normal.

And, the tragedy is that we will continue to have NEEDLESS, PREVENTATIVE deaths. And, that is SINFUL.

KF: Agree with you that it is next to impossible to infer much from the daily figures (a given since daily numbers are NOT reported on a daily basis). The seven-day averages provide some ability to see any trends. Hopefully you are right about the downturn, I am hopeful as well, but don't doubt our ability to make the numbers dis-improve yet again. We are a hard-headed lot.

Our general population is too uneducated to ever get this under control. The best we can hope for is for the smart people to come up with low cost therapeutics with little side effects to treat everyone that will inevitably get infected. When you hire a clown to drive the bus, you have to live (or die) with the clown’s decisions.

8:22, in response to 10:02 -

All illnesses are not the same. That really isn't so much an "admission" as it is both medical fact and common sense. As to definitive numbers for long-term effects, there are none. That does not mean that they just haven't been collected, it means we just do not know yet because that time has not yet passed. However, there is data on a variety of near- and mid-term effects, like cardiac and pulmonary issues that are worrisome. As to what is commonly called "asymptomatic" (a misnomer), there are many such cases but it doesn't mean that
"low-risk" (another misnomer) people won't have severe effects from a SAR-CoV-2 infection. For example, younger, healthy people are at risk for cytokine storm issues, which can lead to very serious symptoms and death.

As to treating all viruses the same, no. Humans are exposed to myriad viruses all the time and many do not infect or transmit in humans. Some rinoviruses readily and easily infect humans and transmit among us, but they produce mild, short-term effects. Others are very deadly and in fact, so deadly they essentially cannot transmit naturally across the human population - they kill the host before the host can transmit them. This is between those extremes, on the higher side of transmitability and severity range, as far as the data indicates several months into this. If you are sincerely interested in virology, there is lots of information out there.

As to sheltering in place, had masks and distancing been initiated, accepted, and practiced at the first signs of transmission, it wouldn't have needed to be so drastic. Had there been enough N95-class "masks" to readily supply the population AND the population readily learned to don, wear, and doff them AND universally accepted wearing them, things would have been and now would be exponentially different. Even if surgical-type masks been available, etc., things would be different. Again, this virus isn't some zombie apocalypse level of contagious or deadly, but it is contagious and serious enough to have acted more appropriately. Yes, some of the blame is on a variety of government entities, both in the US and throughout the world, but a lot of it is on the citizens. To mashup Pogo and Ron White, we met the enemy and had the right to stop it...but not the ability...because it was us.

It is what it is, yo.

8:41: I agree. Right on. Those who downplay the virus or who promise falsely it will soon disappear put their careers before the health, safety and welfare of our American people. Replace them. Now.