Revitalizing Lake Hico and the surrounding area to be a viable economic asset for metro Jackson has been bandied about for years, but dreams of bringing the area back to life have officially come to an end.
Entergy recently closed the power plant there and is draining the lake at the request of the Jackson Public School District. The lake itself exists on 16th Section land which the district leased to Entergy to generate funds for the public school system.
The lake was constructed in the late 1950s to provide cooling ponds for electricity production by the Rex Brown Steam Engine Station of the Mississippi Power & Light Company, now Entergy. Entergy’s lease expired Oct. 31 this year and was not renewed.
Entergy’s Senior Lead Communications Specialist Mara Hartman told Mississippi Today that the Rex Brown Steam Engine Station, located at 1960 W. Northside Drive in Jackson, has reached the end of its useful life. Thelast remaining operating units at the plant were retired in June 2019 after nearly 71 years of service.
“We’re in the process of demolishing the remaining infrastructure of the plant and removing it, with expectations of that to be complete early next year. With the retirement of the plant, the body of water that served as the cooling water facility is no longer needed to provide electricity to the metro area,” Hartman said.
Named for Hinds County, Lake Hico was once home to the Jackson Yacht Club. That all ended in the 1960s at the height of the civil rights movement due to a reluctance to integrate. The yacht club moved its operation to the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Madison County, and the park was closed by the city in 1975.
After a lawsuit by a local resident, the park was reopened in 1985. Recreational use of the main lake remained forbidden. Lake Hico was fenced off from the public with only a smaller, adjacent, same-named park available for picnics, tennis, and basketball.
In September 2020, JPS directed Entergy to drain the lake and breach the levee. The power company owns the surrounding property Rex Brown is located on and will hold on to it “for potential future use,” Hartman said.
JACKSON — Challise Burciaga still remembers early country mornings with her grandmother in Amite County. When Grandma got up at dawn, Burciaga got up too.
The two shared a room so Grandma could keep an eye on her young granddaughter’s breathing. While her sisters slept spread out in bedrooms across the country home, Burciaga was up with the sun and roosters.
But bright summer days on the farm taunted her. While her sisters played outdoors roaming the farmland, Burciaga was stuck inside. As a young child, she developed a bad case of asthma that kept her indoors. All the fun aspects of visiting Grandma’s land instantly became threats to fester her respiratory condition. Grass meant to roll in? A trigger. Dander from the farm animals? A trigger. Dust lurking in the aging barns and play places? A trigger.
The country clinics were not equipped to handle asthma attacks at the time, and she remembers having to carry her bag of medications along everywhere she went. In an emergency, she’d have to treat herself with meds and breathing exercises.
Battling bouts of episodes for years — a few scary ones that landed her in the emergency room — she learned to manage the respiratory condition. She found a pediatrician in her hometown of Vicksburg, never left home without her inhaler and generally learned to navigate the new normal. Her mom worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, so the robust federal health insurance was an asset, helping the family access inhalers, treatments and reliable health care.
After years of learning to manage her asthma despite insurance and job changes — at times, going without or over-extending her inhaler’s shelf life — she feels like she’s backsliding. Over the summer, Burciaga, 38, contracted the coronavirus and says her asthma symptoms haven’t been this bad since childhood.
Ironically though, she thinks her asthma history helped her COVID-19 case — she was able to catch it early and knew how to both manage and treat chest tightness. Her case wasn’t too severe — it started with a headache, then progressed to sinus congestion and chest tightness. She immediately started exercises and home remedies that helped her asthma, and they helped relieve her symptoms.
Knowing her body and particularly her lungs helped, she says. “I’m paying attention to every little symptom that I got. And I think that helped me a lot too. I caught mine really, really early. I could feel it starting,” she said, noting the familiar tightness that creeps up her chest.
She’s recovered now, but worries about the unknown ramifications of COVID-19 on her already weakened respiratory system. She’s not alone — though treatments are improving, research is struggling to keep pace with the novel coronavirus developments and doctors don’t yet know the disease’s long-term effects.
Jackson metro is one of the asthma capitals of the U.S. More people per capita experience complications from the respiratory condition than almost any other city, including regional areas with similar demographics, poverty and environmental conditions — all of which can factor into asthma rates. And of those who have it here, more people die from it than anywhere else in the nation — a worrisome sign that speaks less to the disease itself and more the lacking treatment around it.
Burciaga’s experience is not unique. When it comes to lung conditions specifically, research shows Black Americans are disproportionately high-risk and less likely to get apt care to help manage those conditions. While Black Americans are two times more likely to have asthma, they are three times more likely to die from it. With lung cancer, early diagnosis and treatment is key — but Black Americans are 16% less likely to be diagnosed early, 19% less likely to receive surgical treatment, and 7% more likely to not receive any treatment compared to white Americans, according to a new report from the American Lung Association.
Burciaga teaches high school and has state health insurance, but she hasn’t found a primary care doctor who will reliably prescribe her affordable inhalers on her high-deductible plan. She struggles to find the same for her kids — 12 and 10, who qualify for the state-sponsored Childhood Health Insurance Program, or CHIP — one of whom has asthma and the other has bad allergies.
Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Challise Burciaga of Brandon, with daughters Skye Brittain, 10 (left) and Sania Brittain, 12, and their 4-year-old Yorkie terrier Rudy. Burciaga is a survivor of COVID-19.
Though she says she manages alright on a limited budget as a single mom, she doesn’t feel like she has a financial or medical safety net in an emergency. COVID-19 reminded her of that, as she rode it out at home, sticking to home remedies learned from decades of managing asthma.
Early disparities in COVID-19’s toll on Black Americans has highlighted a stark gap that has long festered in pulmonary care in the U.S. Though the disparities have lessened over time as more white people contracted the coronavirus, Black Mississippians — Black women in particular — still bear the brunt of COVID-19 spread overall. While Black and white women have both seen about 26,000 cases where race is known, because there are fewer Black women, their share of cases is disproportionate. Nearly 5% of Black women in Mississippi have tested positive, compared to 3% of white women.
Lung cancer and chronic lower respiratory diseases like asthma, emphysema and COPD not only are more common in Mississippi, they also kill at higher rates here — meaning health care workers devoted to caring for lung conditions are spread thin against worse cases.
As a stop-gap between pulmonologists and daily treatments, the role of respiratory therapists has been spotlighted during the pandemic. But there aren’t enough of them to go around, and hospitals worry their scarcity will soon limit the specialty treatment needed for severe COVID-19 cases as spread surges across the country. As of late October, there is about one respiratory therapist for every 100 COVID-19 cases in Mississippi — one of the largest ratios in the U.S. and double the nation’s average caseload, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Respiratory therapists manually do what your body can’t when breathing is obstructed, whether from a trauma injury that blocks airflow or when a disease, like COVID-19, attacks the lungs’ ability to breathe on their own. They work every unit in the hospital, manually breathing either through “bagging the patient” by pumping air from a handheld pump into their lungs, or making sure the ventilator and intubation tubes are working at proper speeds.
Allasica Byrd, a respiratory therapist from Clarksdale says despite being the safety net for hospitals’ response to the pandemic, she and her colleagues aren’t paid or respected enough — and they’re burning out, something echoed by hospitals across the nation and in Mississippi. “People didn’t realize how important respiratory therapists are until pandemics and crises hit,” she said. “It’s a bad shortage in it. And they’re overworking us and they’re not paying (enough).”
Respiratory therapist Allasica Byrd, 33, at her Clarksdale vintage store and event space, The Delta Byrd. Owning a local business and community space helps keep her motivated and positive, she says, despite the constant stress of working the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re the ones running around saving and keeping everybody together. We’re the peanut butter in between the bread to keep everything together,” Byrd said. “I have to breathe for you – I got to know what I’m doing when I’m breathing for you.”
Mississippi has the lowest paid respiratory therapists in the nation. And though the state does have one of the densest number of respiratory therapists per 1,000 jobs and per capita, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mississippi also has one of the highest rates of and deaths to lung conditions per capita. Essentially the state has more of the lung specialists, but they’re in higher demand and have larger case loads because of the level of need.
The year has piled on challenges for practitioners and patients who are paying attention to public health factors: spotlighted respiratory disparities with COVID-19; ongoing challenges for patient access to care that’s exacerbated by health care worker shortages; and efforts to tackle institutional racism and bias in health care, sparked by renewed focus on the Black Lives Matter movement after white police officers killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in May.
With all these factors in mind, the American College of Chest Physicians recently launched a new effort — listening. Their virtual Listening Tour launched September in Jackson, where one in seven residents have a chronic lung condition — 57 times the nation’s average. The tour, put on through the group’s philanthropy arm the Chest Foundation, brought together patients, like Burciaga, caregivers, community leaders, and providers to frankly identify real-world barriers that keep Jackson’s lung conditions so prevalent and chronic.
Providers participating in the new listening effort said starting in Jackson means acknowledging that robust access to care has historically fallen along racial and class lines, and addressing it will need an intersectional approach. But they too said, health care needs to get back to the basics of treating people, not just their disease.
“We have a health issue here in Mississippi but we have a bigger heart issue here in Mississippi. It’s not about Black and white, it’s not about insured versus uninsured, it’s not about low class versus high class, it’s just about humanity and dignity,” said Dr. Justin Turner, an internist in Jackson.
Jackson is a microcosm of barriers to accessing care, but in the hub of the state’s medical system. If each of the 26 practicing pulmonologists in Jackson, the densest physician population in the state, took an even share of all the patients with lung conditions, they’d have more than 1,600 patients each. Too, 16% of residents are uninsured, so finding specialty care is not the only problem — it’s paying for it.
The first stop on the new tour identified three major barriers to overall lung health in Jackson — all anecdotal, but also reflected in research: access to care and treatment, such as un- or under-insurance rates, high deductibles and medication cost; equity imbalance, like few Black doctors and health disparities; and lacking trust in the system.
Based on their report from the tour, the foundation is recommending actions across the pulmonology field, including: teach providers to ensure patients can afford medication when they prescribe it and keep up with the prescriptions; ensure easily accessible information about doctors who accept low-income health insurance; educate providers to identify and understand barriers to access; and, raise awareness of local resources to help address social determinants of health that exacerbate disparities.
Public health advocates have long-agreed that social determinants of health, like living in poverty, low levels of education and inability to meet basic needs like food and shelter are often the missing building blocks when it comes to overall wellness. And too often, it’s lacking the proper health insurance to cover surprise medical costs.
For Burciaga, she hopes sharing her story can help others learn about lung health and the disparities endemic to accessing care.
Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
“I’m feeling fine now,” said Challise Burciaga in her Brandon home with dog Rudy, 4 and daughters Sania, 12 and Skye, 10. Burciaga recovered from COVID-19.
“As far as healthcare goes, I really wish it wasn’t such a political game,” she said. “That’s what’s so frustrating, is that they (lawmakers) use healthcare as a pawn in their game, but they’re not really even taking into consideration how it really affects people’s lives and how much some people really depend on it. It’s sad that the United States being what it’s supposed to be — the reputation of what it should be and is supposed to be — is so far from what it really is.”
I hope you and your family have a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving. I am very thankful for you, for reading my work and for your support of Mississippi Today. 2020 has been a challenge for many of us, but we’re making it through together. On behalf of my family at Mississippi Today, we wish you the best — and say thank you.
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Thursday, November 26:
New cases: 1,746| New Deaths: 18
Total Hospitalizations: 1,039
Total cases: 147,382| Total Deaths: 3,763
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 41 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
The seven-day new case average reached 1,294 last week, a 75% increase since the start of November and the highest mark since July 31.
The health department has reported over 9,000 new cases in the last week; a threshold only surpassed by one other week in July.
The number of hospitalizations have also begun to surge in the last month; using the seven-day rolling averages, total hospitalizations have increased by 46% in that time, ICU patients by 39%, and patients on ventilators by 47%.
Though hospitalizations haven’t reached peak July levels, they are growing at a quicker pace than before. On Oct. 3, average total hospitalizations were at their lowest point since the state health department started tracking them. In seven weeks, numbers grew by 85%. The same percent growth took 12 weeks from April to July, heading into the peak.
Overall, the state’s ICUs are 83% full, with COVID-19 patients comprising 31% of all ICU beds. Sixteen of the state’s highest level COVID-care centers are at 88% capacity, and six of them — both Baptist Memorial Hospitals in Southaven and in the Golden Triangle, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Baptist and Merit in Jackson, and the Delta Regional Medical Center in Greenville — have zero ICU beds available.
Within the last three weeks, Mississippi has moved from “orange” to “red” on the Global Health Institute’s risk level tracker, meaning it now averages over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 residents, along with most of the country. Despite the rise in cases in the state, Mississippi now ranks 33rd in new cases per capita, dropping from 26th two weeks ago.
Counties across the state saw large increases in cases over the last week. Winston County (13% increase), Jefferson County (12%), Amite County (12%), Stone County (12%) and Choctaw County (11%) saw the biggest surges in that span.
MSDH reports that 121,637 people have recovered.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
James Meredith announces future plans to open the James Meredith Museum and Bible Society , located at 217 W. Griffith Street in Jackson, on Nov. 25, 2020.
Author and civil rights activist James Meredith announced plans Wednesday to open a museum that will chronicle his life’s accomplishments, house an archival library and provide a sanctuary for those wanting to study the Bible.
The project, announced at a press conference, fulfills a continuing dream of Meredith’s to “help uplift the moral character of families and to build leadership skills in kids,” Meredith said. He said the museum is slated to open in late 2021. The museum will be located at 217 W. Griffith Street in Jackson.
Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
James Meredith at the site of his future museum and Bible Society Mission, located at 217 W. Griffith Street in Jackson.
Meredith said the museum is a multi-million dollar project, and the nonprofit the museum will operate under, the James H. Meredith Interpretive Center and Bible Society, is currently accepting donations.
Meredith became a household name when he integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. He went on to attend law school at Columbia University in 1968 and remained active in the civil rights movement, including organizing the March Against Fear in 1966 when he was shot attempting to walk from Memphis to Jackson to encourage voter registration. He is also the author of several books.
Sen. Roger Wicker is among the congressional Republicans from Mississippi who have not publicly acknowledged that President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi’s senior senator and an ardent ally of Donald Trump, is helping the president look for alleged voter fraud.
Three days after the Nov. 3 election, Wicker sent an email to his supporters providing a link for people to file reports of voter fraud.
“President Trump’s team reached out to me about the voting fraud that is going on in our country right now,” Wicker said in a Nov. 6 email and on social media. “There is NO excuse for any of this. Americans should be confident that their ballot was submitted correctly, legally and untampered.”
Wicker this week did not respond to questions asking how many people reading his email have reported voter fraud.
The Trump campaign since the election has issued multiple unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, ranging from Venezuela conspiring with a voting machine company to change votes to dead people voting. No widespread voter fraud has been found, and more than 30 Trump campaign lawsuits have been dismissed in several states since the election.
The Trump campaign and its supporters also have attempted to ask courts to throw out large swarths of ballots from large urban areas with a high density of minority voters. None of those efforts have succeeded, and in most cases, judges have tossed the cases.
A growing number of congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have publicly conceded that former Vice President Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 election and is the president-elect. An even larger number of congressional Republicans have reportedly privately acknowledged that Trump’s efforts to litigate the 2020 election are futile.
But Republicans in Mississippi’s congressional delegation have remained silent on the issue in recent days. They have publicly endorsed Trump’s challenge of the election and have stoked unfounded narratives of widespread voter fraud.
They did not, however, respond to recent questions from Mississippi Today about the president’s challenge of the election in which he lost the popular vote by more than 6 million votes and lost the electoral college 306-232.
Staffers for Wicker, junior Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Reps. Trent Kelly, Michael Guest and Steven Palazzo did not respond to several Mississippi Today questions about the matter.
Mississippi’s sole Democratic congressman, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, told Mississippi Today that Trump should concede. Thompson also said the president’s efforts to convince state legislative leaders to try to appoint alternative electors in some of the states the president lost should be investigated.
“In my mind, Trump should be charged with some form of obstruction because the process of elections in Michigan is clear,” Thompson said in a statement. “Any candidate on the ballot who is having meetings with people who are making the decision is tantamount to obstruction and should be illegal.”
While the state’s congressional delegation, with the exception of Thompson, has refused to comment recently, they voiced support for the president’s effort to challenge the election results soon after Election Day.
Hyde-Smith, also a staunch supporter of the president, has commented on the election results multiple times on social media.
“Do you stand for fair and transparent elections? Do you believe in protecting our democracy? If you want every legal vote counted, you can help President Trump by donating to his legal fund here,” she said on social media on Nov. 6.
The day before multiple news organizations called the election for Biden, Wicker, Hyde-Smith, Kelly, Guest and Palazzo issued a joint statement, saying in part: “Americans should have confidence in our voting systems and that all ballots have been submitted correctly and legally. This is precisely what President Trump and his legal team are seeking.
“Any allegations of voting irregularities, including ballot tampering or voting by ineligible persons, should be investigated and adjudicated to the fullest extent of the law,” the joint statement continued.
Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani has argued that votes from large cities should not be counted because of alleged fraud. They have not documented that alleged fraud in the multiple lawsuits that have been filed.
“It changes the results of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County,” he argued recently, referring to Detroit.
Wendy Bailey, formerly deputy director of administration for the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, was named director of the agency last week. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
The Mississippi Board of Mental Health, which oversees an embattled agency often accused of perpetuating a powerful dynasty, has hired a longtime agency spokesperson and strategist as its top chief.
Former Mississippi Department of Mental Health Director Diana Mikula, who took the helm of the agency in 2014, announced her retirement last week. The same day, the board chose Wendy Bailey, the agency’s deputy director of administration and former communications director, to replace her.
“I just feel like this is a missed opportunity,” Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, a registered nurse who sat on the state’s Mental Health Task Force, said in a Wednesday interview with Mississippi Today. “For the board of mental health to not put an interim until we could find somebody who is absolutely the correct person professionally, educationally and has actually touched and treated a mentally ill person. You know, I’m just in shock.”
Bailey will assume responsibility for ushering in reforms ordered by a federal judge within an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over Mississippi’s mental health care delivery system, which the judge said contained “major gaps.”
“Understanding that there’s always room for improvement and never settling for the status quo is what drives me,” Bailey told Mississippi Today Wednesday. “…I certainly hope that the people who want to see our state’s mental health system continue to get better and advance change and advance growth will judge me and evaluate me on my performance and my vision.”
The justice department primarily accused the state of serving folks with mental illness in environments that are more restrictive than necessary — locking people in state hospitals as opposed to providing community-based care.
“There is a lot of talk, there is a lot of planning, but there is also a lot of people being hurt in the process,” U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves wrote in his Sept. 4, 2019 order, quoting testimony from a person living with mental illness in Mississippi.
Under recent leadership, the department has diverted more money from the budgets of state institutions to community services.
Bailey, who received her bachelor’s in communication from Belhaven College in 2003 and her master’s degree in communication management from Webster University in 2010, has worked for the agency for nearly 16 years, first as its public relations director. She is also a licensed mental health administrator with the department. As an agency spokesperson, she has worked to craft public messaging for the department, create outreach campaigns and develop strategic plans.
Regarding Bailey’s experience, Currie said, “I think this is appalling.”
In the last year in particular, a board statement said Bailey “has been intimately involved in the executive leadership,” of the agency that employs 5,700 and serves 110,000 people. The board credits her with playing a critical role in both the ongoing litigation and the agency’s fight against COVID-19.
“There is no one with more institutional knowledge plus executive experience than Wendy,” said Stewart Rutledge, an Oxford real estate developer and citizen representative on the mental health board. “In light of the fact that we are in the middle of two extraordinarily difficult situations, being the ongoing federal litigation and COVID, the need to have a smooth and stable transition is really important. But there’s no guarantee that we would have that. For that to happen, you have to have the right person and that person has to be willing to take the job. We were really lucky that that person existed.”
Rutledge said that securing a leader who was already familiar with the deeply complicated state agency in such a crucial moment trumped the benefits of advertising the position and conducting a national search.
“I would say the only reason they would make a move like this is they don’t want somebody else coming in to uncover where the bodies are buried,” Currie said. “…They always hire within at the Department of Mental Health because they don’t want somebody coming in and realizing how badly things are being done there.”
Bailey told Mississippi Today she is committed to bringing in outside experts to provide technical assistance to the agency, in particular to improve the state’s data tracking mechanisms so that it can pinpoint outcomes and identify exactly how well the services are working.
“That is not something I’m going to shy away from, from letting other people provide that assistance and that help as well. I think that’s how you grow stronger,” Bailey said.
The board’s statement says that Mikula began discussing her retirement over a year ago, saying she needed to dedicate more time with her family, but she agreed to continue with the agency through the federal trial.
“We, the Board, are aware that, prior to this statement, this hiring process could have appeared rushed or predetermined, but, in reality, this has been a very deliberate process which has taken over a year of our work,” the board wrote. “And, we are very happy that the end result has yielded such a strong candidate.”
Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, said he understands the potential concerns surrounding the hiring process, but, “I’d rather focus on the delivery of services and what we do going forward than on the deliberations of the committee and how they came to hire a new executive director.”
Rutledge cited two major challenges the agency faces today: navigating the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit to get the best outcomes for the state and finding ways to offer competitive salaries so it can hire and retain quality mental health professionals.
Within the maze of mental health services in the state, many advocates say the Department of Mental Health should be focused on expanding care in the community, but the agency doesn’t actually operate the primary vehicle for those public services, the Community Mental Health Centers.
“I think the Community Mental Health Centers will tell you they’re spending an awful lot of time just trying to keep their head above water, what with the continuing funding issues and with the coronavirus,” Bryan said.
Bailey said she plans to strengthen the department’s relationship with the centers, in part by offering them more state grant funding.
To understand the delivery of mental health services in Mississippi, longtime experts say, you must consider the succession of leaders at the state department. One of Mikula’s predecessors, Albert R. “Randy” Hendrix, headed the mental health agency for over thirty years and was in charge when Bailey first joined.
“All of those people that are in those positions, they were all Randy Hendrix hires and hold overs. And he controlled it with an iron hand,” said Jackie Edwards, retired director of Region 7 Community Mental Health Center. “After he left, none of them knew what to do.”
The new top level hire, Edwards said, shows “there’s just no change in the direction that they’re taking.”
The Golden Egg is at stake Saturday in this craziest of football seasons.
One guy’s opinion on Saturday’s Egg Bowl: If you combined the Ole Miss offense and the Mississippi State defense, you’d have an upper level Southeastern Conference football team.
But you can’t do that. So, instead, we’ve got Mississippi State, with a 2-5 record, limping into Oxford to play Ole Miss, which is 3-4. The oddsmakers make Ole Miss a 9.5-point favorite, which seems especially high given the rivalry and the situation.
This is not exactly what we anticipated when Mississippi’s two SEC schools hired new football coaches less than a year ago. Mike Leach and Lane Kiffin were proven winners with national name recognition who infused both fan bases with enthusiasm. Never mind there were many reasons – mostly involving talent level – why both jobs were open in the first place.
Rick Cleveland
Ole Miss couldn’t stop anybody. State couldn’t score enough points. New coaches, no matter their pedigree, weren’t going to magically change that overnight.
And then COVID-19 hit and all bets were off. Every college football team nationwide was impacted. But new coaches, trying to install new systems, with new staffs, were especially hamstrung without spring training, normal summer programs and fall camps. What’s more, the SEC went to all-SEC schedules, much more taxing and without the occasional “gimme games” to pad the record.
So, what we see is what we get. And the future of each program will be decided by how well Kiffin, Leach and their staffs recruit. Ole Miss must improve light years on defense; Leach must get the Jimmys and Joes he needs to execute his famed air raid offense.
That said, it sure seems to me Leach has the quarterback he needs for the future. True freshman Will Rogers – you really have to love the name – has all the tools to do what Leach needs. He can make all the throws. He’s tough. He’s football smart, a coach’s son. He sold me on his abilities in the Mississippi-Alabama all-star game last year when he came off the bench, essentially on one leg, and brought the Mississippians back from a 10-3 deficit to win in the fourth quarter. He Willed them to win is what he did. It should have been clear to anyone watching he has the “it” factor.
On the other side, Ole Miss has Matt Corral, the Californian, who has far exceeded what most had expected from him this season. Only Alabama’s Mac Jones and Florida’s Kyle Trask have thrown for more yards in the SEC. Only Jones has completed a higher percentage of passes. Corral really has been splendid.
While Ole Miss has been explosive all season long, State often has struggled to move the ball. But the Bulldogs seemed much improved against a rugged defense in a tough loss at Georgia last week. Perhaps the best Egg Bowl bet of all is the “over” in the over-under total of 67 points. After all, Ole Miss has proven it can score on anyone, including Alabama and Florida. And the Ole Miss defense hasn’t stopped anyone, at least not yet.
Hard to say what it means that Ole Miss has had an unexpected week off because of the COVID-induced postponement of last week’s scheduled game with Texas A&M, while State was playing a grueling, down-to-the-wire game at Georgia. Normally, you’d say the advantage swings to Ole Miss, but State made real progress at Athens. The Bulldogs should be better because of it.
Prediction? It’s a fool’s errand in this season of so much turmoil. I mean, today is Wednesday and how do we know for sure they will even play? Or who will play if they play? The answer is that we won’t until final COVID testing is done. Games are being postponed and canceled all over. Just Tuesday, the Southern Miss-UAB game, scheduled for Friday, was canceled because of COVID issues within the USM program. State played last week with just 49 scholarship players. In this 2020 season, nothing is certain.
But if they play, I would go with the home team, Ole Miss, in a high scoring game, and I would expect the best player on the field, the irrepressible Elijah Moore, to make a play that wins it.
We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.
This page was last updated Wednesday, November 25:
New cases: 1,092| New Deaths: 16
Total Hospitalizations: 1,041
Total cases: 145,636| Total Deaths: 3,745
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 41 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
The seven-day new case average reached 1,294 last week, a 75% increase since the start of November and the highest mark since July 31.
The health department has reported over 9,000 new cases in the last week; a threshold only surpassed by one other week in July.
The number of hospitalizations have also begun to surge in the last month; using the seven-day rolling averages, total hospitalizations have increased by 46% in that time, ICU patients by 39%, and patients on ventilators by 47%.
Though hospitalizations haven’t reached peak July levels, they are growing at a quicker pace than before. On Oct. 3, average total hospitalizations were at their lowest point since the state health department started tracking them. In seven weeks, numbers grew by 85%. The same percent growth took 12 weeks from April to July, heading into the peak.
Overall, the state’s ICUs are 83% full, with COVID-19 patients comprising 31% of all ICU beds. Sixteen of the state’s highest level COVID-care centers are at 88% capacity, and six of them — both Baptist Memorial Hospitals in Southaven and in the Golden Triangle, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Baptist and Merit in Jackson, and the Delta Regional Medical Center in Greenville — have zero ICU beds available.
Within the last three weeks, Mississippi has moved from “orange” to “red” on the Global Health Institute’s risk level tracker, meaning it now averages over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 residents, along with most of the country. Despite the rise in cases in the state, Mississippi now ranks 33rd in new cases per capita, dropping from 26th two weeks ago.
Counties across the state saw large increases in cases over the last week. Winston County (13% increase), Jefferson County (12%), Amite County (12%), Stone County (12%) and Choctaw County (11%) saw the biggest surges in that span.
MSDH reports that 121,637 people have recovered.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
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