Magnolia State News

Mississippi finds itself at 1,112 deaths per million making it 45th in the country when it comes to COVID-related deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

 The project found that when it comes to COVID-19 data, people have been looking at decontextualized data, which is causing hysteria like children staying out of school and businesses shutting down.  

Mississippi’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state has had a peak of 400 people per million in hospitals, which isn’t anywhere near increased case numbers. 

“At first blush, 1112 deaths/million, all mostly during the second wave seems like a pretty bad deal, but when you dive into the numbers, Mississippi has done far better,” the commentary states.”First of all, this is one of the few metrics where Mississippi has ever left Massachusetts in the dust. 

“Because Mississippi is significantly poorer and more unhealthy than Massachusetts, so performing better on a health index, tells you something went deeply wrong--in Massachusetts. Digging in further, Mississippi has a 23% lower death rate than Massachusetts. At the peak of Mississippi's epidemic, they had 400 people hospitalized/million. Deaths/day/million peaked at 12, for about 2 days. 

“Deaths in Mississippi have been declining steadily since mid-August. While deaths in Mississippi have been going down, hospitalizations have been edging up. And in Mississippi, once again, we see the more logarithmic interaction between case increases and hospitalizations, and both remain relatively flat, with deaths declining. 

“Mississippi ostensibly has more cases than Massachusetts, but similar or fewer deaths. In Mississippi's case, they have 2.5 fewer cases, yet somehow has the same number of deaths as Massachusetts, with Mississippi trending in the right direction, while Massachusetts goes in the wrong direction. As the song says, "there's something happening here....”

 Since Sept. 15, there has been a significant increase in testing for COVID-19 at 55 percent, which has also led to an increase in positive cases, leading many to assume the country is heading into a third wave of infections and deaths.

 Emily Burns with The Pragmatist writes that it’s important to put the new numbers into context so that people will make wise decisions regarding what to do about the pandemic. She writes that in May, cases were tracked at nearly the same as hospitalizations. She notes that deaths and hospitalizations are more reliable data when tracking than cases are.

With COVID-19 testing up 70 percent since the second wave, Burns points out that the surge in testing is responsible for the increased number of new cases seen across the nation, not an increased infection rate many have been led to believe.