During a live zoom press conference yesterday, State health officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs and several other health officials were some of the first in Mississippi to receive an injection of the Pfizer vaccine. Dobbs says the vaccine is becoming available for the state's healthcare workers and long term care facilities as Mississippi is experiencing it's highest COVID-19 transmission rate.
"It's ugly right now and it's about to get a whole lot uglier," said Dobbs. "There's no way to imagine that these thousands of thousands of backlog cases are not going to translate into hospitalized patients and ICU patients."
Last week, the state averaged 2,129 cases per day. Dobbs says about 10% of coronavirus cases require hospitalization and patients tend to remain in the hospital for long periods of time. He says currently hospital beds are full statewide and urgent access to care for some Mississippians have been difficult to manage.
"When there are no available rooms within the hospital and an outlying hospital needs services, they'll call the hospital and a hospital will typically say we're full look somewhere else. But what do you do when there is nowhere else? And what we've seen over the past week is we've seen people, especially sick folks critically ill folks in rural areas, who have not had access to critical care health services. This is the tip of the thing that we've been really afraid of this whole time," said Dobbs.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center has received 3900 doses of the coronavirus vaccine and expect to begin administering doses to employees tomorrow.
.jpg)
