JACKSON, Miss. — When the coronavirus first scythed through the nation in early 2020, few places needed help fighting it more than Scott County, Miss., a rural patch of chicken processing plants and pine forests an hour east of the state capital, Jackson.
The poverty rate for the county’s 28,000 residents was far above the nation’s. So, too, were rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses that worsen the risk of severe Covid-19. Yet Mississippi’s health department, struggling under huge budget cuts ordered by the state’s Legislature, had deployed just two nurse practitioners to cover a quarter-million residents in Scott and eight other counties.
...hospitals are still about as full as they’ve ever been during the pandemic – at least three-quarters of available beds across the country were in use for all of 2022 – and that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. ...
Meanwhile, as of early December, RSV cases reported by Yale were beginning to go down and COVID-19 and flu cases were increasing. A big part of the flu increase, he explains, is our lack of immunity from having not been exposed to the virus for several seasons due to masking and other precautions, many of which have fallen to the wayside.
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