CLARKSDALE — City employees across all departments are seeing upticks in COVID-19 cases, leaving a shortage of employees to keep the town clean, according to Mayor Chuck Espy.
As a result, he took to social media Thursday to ask citizens to “do their part” by ceasing to litter, picking up trash and tidying up their neighborhoods for a minimum of 15 minutes a day.
“A lot of my team members are getting hit with the virus. I’m asking you to continue to wear your mask, practice social distancing and wash your hands,” Espy said on a Facebook live. “My request is I need your help and here’s how … Can you please get out and help cleanup in your neighborhood?”
In a phone call with Mississippi Today, Espy said he could not release the number of employees who tested positive for the virus. He did say there are currently 39 employees with COVID-19 related issues. This number accounts for individuals who may have tested positive or is awaiting test results, for instance. The city has approximately 138 employees. However, he did say, the city is becoming a “red zone,” and a “panic situation.” As of August 12, Coahoma County had a total of 798 confirmed cases and 13 deaths, according to data by the Mississippi State Department of Health.
This past week the state health department reported the lowest daily case totals of COVID-19 in about a month, but the state’s test positivity rate remains one of the highest in the nation, Mississippi Today reported.
Last week, the state department of health issued an isolation order for individuals diagnosed with COVID-19. This order states those infected must isolate at home and remain at home for 14 days. Employers may approve the individual’s return to work 10 days after the day they experienced symptoms or were tested. If a person refuses to abide by the law, they may be forced to pay a fine of $500 or jail time for six months.
Aside from the state regulations and guidelines outlined, Clarksdale has not implemented any additional measures for city employees.
Though city workers are “stretched to the max,” Espy said the city is still able to conduct its daily functions and operations, other than providing upkeep for the city. Additionally, they are working to hire private contractors to do grass cleanup and demolish 75 abandoned homes.
“At least once a week, I go out in the community … clean up right there in my own neighborhood and it takes about 15 minutes and we are needing that type of help,” Espy added. “Clean it up, bag it up, and throw it in your trash can.”
An internal poll released by Democrat Mike Espy’s U.S. Senate campaign on Thursday reports he’s gaining ground and is within five points of incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, to whom he lost by more than seven points in a 2018 special election.
But Hyde-Smith’s campaign released its own internal poll later Thursday, reporting she has a 20-point lead, and her camp questioned the methodology and veracity of Espy’s poll. Many statewide and national politicos don’t consider the race to be competitive, and previous polling has shown the incumbent Republican with healthier leads in one of the reddest states in the country.
Espy is challenging Hyde-Smith in the November general election.
The Espy telephone poll of 600 likely Mississippi voters from July 30 to Aug. 9 reports Hyde-Smith leading with 47%, Espy with 42% and about 3% supporting a third party.
The survey is Espy’s best showing in released polling to date, and he discussed it on a national MSNBC show on Thursday morning.
“The ground is shifting here in Mississippi,” Espy said on MSNBC Thursday morning. “We recently saw it with the taking down of the Confederate flag. Most Mississippians now want to turn the page and move us toward progress … We’re closing the gap.”
The poll, which shows a margin of error of 4.1%, was conducted by Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, a pollster for high profile Democrats around the nation like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
In a release Thursday afternoon, the Hyde-Smith campaign said “the methodology is awful” on the poll Espy released. The campaign noted that a poll of 600 people should not have taken 10 days to complete, and said it “cherry picked” demographics among independents.
“(The poll) emphasizes that they are on track to lose by less this time,” the Hyde-Smith campaign wrote. “Not sure that’s much to brag about … Mississippi is not a state where you win by mobilizing independents. You win by turning out your base voters, which they admit Espy is failing to do.”
A May Public Policy Polling survey for the Mississippi Democratic Party showed Hyde-Smith leading Espy 49% to 41%, and a May poll by Impact Management Group for Y’all Politics showed Hyde-Smith leading 58% to 31%.
In 1986, Espy became the first African American elected to the U.S. House in Mississippi since Reconstruction and later served as U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. Hyde-Smith, first appointed to fill the Senate seat by Gov. Phil Bryant, in 2018 became the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi.
This week’s Espy survey notes previous polls were conducted before protests across the country and in Mississippi over the police killing of George Floyd and the historic decision by Mississippi lawmakers to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.
The Espy campaign is making race a major issue amid the national debate of racial inequities in government. The campaign has focused on comments Hyde-Smith made in 2018 about public hangings and has accused her of “glorifying Confederate symbols.” The November ballot will also include a referendum on replacing the Mississippi flag, predicted to be a factor in turnout and voting.
“We do have the numbers, and we can win,” Espy said. “We will not only take down the flag in November, we’re going to take out Confederate Cindy and send her back to the museum.”
Some other findings reported in the survey the Espy campaign released Thursday:
Espy is up by 8 points over Hyde-Smith with independent voters, and tied with Hyde-Smith among young white voters, aged 18-34.
The poll included 35% Black likely voters, and its sample reported voting for President Trump in 2016 54% to 39%. Trump won in Mississippi in 2016 with 58%.
The Hyde-Smith campaign said: “A well-known African-American candidate who just ran last cycle should be getting more than 85% of the African-American vote.”
Espy’s pollsters also said “Donald Trump is weaker in Mississippi than he was in 2016,” saying he polled 53% to 43% versus a generic Democratic candidate. In 2016, Trump won Mississippi with 58%.
The Hyde-Smith campaign called this point “nonsensical.”
“If Trump wins Mississippi by 10 points, there are not many paths to victory for Espy,” the statement said. “It’s hard to imagine many, if any, voters deciding to vote for Trump and then on the next line of the ballot deciding to not vote for one of Trump’s best allies in the Senate.”
The survey Hyde-Smith released was conducted by the Republican pollster the Tarrance Group, and was also of 600 likely Mississippi voters. It was conducted from June 22-25, with a margin of error of 4.1%.
Hyde-Smith with a favorable/unfavorable rating of 51%/35%, compared to Espy at 47%/33%.
Hyde-Smith with strong approval ratings among key blocs, such as seniors, 59%; conservatives, 64% and white voters, 70%.
Hyde-Smith with a higher lead margin than President Trump, who polled 55% to 40% against Joe Biden, and with 97% of Trump voters reporting they plan to vote for Hyde-Smith.
“(Espy’s) numbers are obviously an attempt by a failing campaign to manufacture press stories and to try to boost fundraising,” Hyde-Smith’s campaign said in a statement. “We don’t blame them for trying, but we think the results on Election Day will be most similar to our polling, just as happened in 2018.”
Espy campaign manager Joe O’Hern, in a statement said: “Things only keep getting worse for Sen. Hyde-Smith. After outraising her 3-to-1 and raising more in July than Hyde-Smith did the entire second quarter, momentum continues to build for Mike Espy … It is clear that Mississippians are tired of Hyde-Smith’s weak leadership and partisan political games ….”
Rodney Boss sits outside the house he rents in south Jackson while his fiance watched over their two children, aged 1 and 5, inside. One-and-a-half months behind on rent and his claim for unemployment stuck in investigations, Boss worries his family will soon face eviction in the middle of a pandemic.
Over half of Mississippi renters could face eviction during pandemic without protections from Congress
Data shows most renters were teetering before the pandemic, and much more rental assistance is needed to fill the gaps.
More than half of Mississippi’s roughly 352,000 renter households are at risk of eviction if Congress doesn’t extend protections for families struggling as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers estimated.
More than a third of all Mississippians said they missed last month’s rent or mortgage payment or believed they wouldn’t be able to pay the next on time, Census survey results show, making Mississippi the third most vulnerable state in the nation for housing.
By Thursday, Congress remained locked in stalemate over issuing more COVID-19 relief to states after crucial protections expired at the end of July, thrusting many families into greater economic uncertainty.
The state is doling out millions in rental assistance to people impacted by the virus, but the program’s current funding is a small fraction of what’s needed to keep people housed during this recession.
Eviction filings were fairly rare when Rachel Harris, newly appointed Lee County Justice Court Clerk, started working at the court nearly 20 years ago. She’d receive these removal requests from landlords maybe once or twice a week.
In more recent years, she said the court sees two or three each day among a population of about 85,000.
Some landlords in the county were so determined to oust tenants who had gotten behind on rent, even as the pandemic began, they shut off the lights in some units to compel them to leave. A judge ordered the owners to restore power after an emergency motion by the Mississippi Center for Justice, and a statewide eviction freeze took effect shortly after. The state’s moratorium lifted June 1.
“We had a lot of them (landlords) that were aggravated when they couldn’t do evictions during the shutdown and everything,” Harris said. “But I think since everything’s kind of opened back up and they’re allowing evictions now, it hasn’t really picked up any more.”
“They picked up basically where they left off,” she added.
Housing researchers say the existing housing affordability crisis is about to get much worse now that the people seeking unemployment benefits by late July — some 200,000 in Mississippi, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Labor data — have seen their weekly benefit drop to as low as $30.
“The problem feels like an iceberg. It feels like we see some of it, but there’s a much greater portion of the problem that’s under the surface that we don’t see yet,” Scott Spivey, executive director of the Mississippi Home Corporation, said in mid-July.
Renters, who are disproportionately low income-earners, have been harder hit by the pandemic because job and income losses caused by shutdowns are concentrated in industries employing lower wage workers, such as food service, entertainment and hospitality. Evictions also disproportionately affect Black Mississippians, who are overrepresented in low wage jobs and nearly three times as likely to live in poverty and to be unemployed than white people.
A little less than a third of the state’s population — 915,000 people — live in Mississippi’s 352,000 renter households. A study by global advisory firm Stout Risius Ross shows as high as 58% of those households are at risk of eviction. The national figure is about 43%.
By mid-July, more than a third of all Mississippians either missed their previous month’s rent or mortgage payment or believed they would not be able to make the next month’s payment on time, according to a weekly survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Based on these most recent survey results, Mississippi is the nation’s third most housing insecure state, behind just Texas and Louisiana. Nationwide, about a quarter of Americans said they faced this scenario.
Over half of Mississippians also said they had lost income through their work since March 13, just slightly more than the national average.
“If you’re not going to continue the boost in unemployment, there has to be a plan B to provide for basic necessities in the middle of a pandemic when a lot of people don’t have the choice to go back to work,” Spivey said. “They have to do something. And being paralyzed by indecision is going to leave a lot of people in a really bad situation.”
Most renters in Mississippi were already teetering, spending more than 30% of their income on housing before the pandemic screeched the economy to a halt in March. This is increasingly the case as housing costs continue to rise while wages stagnate.
As a result, thousands are evicted every year — resulting in hasty moves, lost belongings, displaced family members and homelessness. In Jackson, the capital city, between seven and eight families are evicted from their homes every day, according to 2016 data, the most recent available, gathered by the Princeton University-based research group the Eviction Lab. Of all large cities in the nation, it had the fifth highest eviction rate that year.
While Congress continues to negotiate the details of the next stimulus package, President Donald Trump issued an order on Saturday indicating he would consider extending the federal eviction moratorium, which expired July 25, but it only applies to renters living in federally subsidized housing.
He also ordered to continue a boost to unemployment benefits by $400-a-week, down from $600. But because Trump is requiring that states pay 25% of the supplement, Gov. Tate Reeves said he wasn’t sure if Mississippi would participate.
In an earlier relief package, the federal government offered states almost $3 billion in rental assistance grants to cover the gaps for people who found themselves unable to afford rent due to the pandemic. Mississippi initially received $8 million — which it began administering through three housing programs in northern, central and southern regions of the state in late June — and then another $10 million.
Housing advocates say these programs provide the maximum benefit by keeping tenants housed and landlords financially secure, preventing the hefty back-end costs of evictions and homelessness.
But it will take at least $100 million to meet the enormous need across the state, researchers estimate.
Many landlords say they’re committed to working with tenants who are struggling and have shown an attempt to pay. Becky Ivison, who owns about 1,200 units across the state, said some renters were confused by the moratorium, believing they did not have to pay rent during those months. Now they’re several months behind, but Ivison said her property managers have set up payment plans as opposed to rushing the tenants out.
“Our goal is not to have to process any evictions,” Ivison said. “These people are trying to get back to work, trying to take care of their families … the last thing that they need is for us to have to process an eviction.”
The organizations administering rental assistance also say they’re communicating with landlords so they know how to direct their tenants to seek help.
By July 31, these organizations had received 2,934 calls, were processing 2,037 applications and had committed just $342,500 to needy renters. The program typically covers an approved applicant’s rent for three months, unless they become ineligible in the meantime. And they must demonstrate they are short on rent because of the pandemic.
While the state has issued grants to small businesses, paid for broadband expansion and distance learning and funded colleges and workforce development, advocates argue it has done little to enact protections or direct aid to families facing hardships to ensure they can continue to support themselves.
“The Mississippi Legislature looked fully at institutional needs and kind of ignored basic household needs in their allocation of coronavirus relief funds and are leaving it up to the federal government to make sure that families have a roof over their head and food on their plate,” John Sullivan, a policy director with national affordable housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners Gulf Coast, said.
Enterprise estimates it will cost between $107 million to $194 million to provide rental assistance to Mississippi households who will need it between now and the new year. The cost is between $196 million to $408 million to cover rents through July 2021, based on unemployment projections from the Congressional Budget Office and average rent costs.
According to these estimations, unemployment impacted roughly 80,000 renter households in April and will continue to impact around 50,000 well into 2021.
Mississippians in need of rental assistance should contact the Continuum of Care program covering their region: Central Mississippi Continuum of Care (769-237-1012) covers Hinds, Rankin, Madison, Warren and Copiah counties; Open Doors Homeless Coalition (228-604-2048) covers Hancock, Harrison, Jackson, Pearl River, Stone and George counties and Mississippi United to End Homelessness (601-960-0557) covers the rest of the state.
Good Friday morning everyone! Temperatures are currently in the mid to upper 70s, under partly cloudy skies this morning. Scattered showers and thunderstorms will be possible again this afternoon. Otherwise, we will have a mix of sun and clouds with a high near 88. Calm wind becoming west northwest around 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low around 71 and a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms.
The weekend will bring a mix of sun and clouds with temperatures in the low 90s and a chance of showers and thunderstorms through Sunday
This past week Mississippi’s state health department has reported the lowest daily case totals of COVID-19 in about a month, but the state’s test positivity rate remains one of the highest in the nation.
The seven-day rolling average for new cases reached 847 on Wednesday, its lowest point since July 15. However, as testing numbers mirrored a similar decrease since the start of August, Mississippi’s weekly positivity rate — the number of new cases divided by the number of new tests, over a week’s span — has remained roughly the same over the last two weeks, at around 20%.
“We know we had another very good day of numbers today, at least relative to where we had been for the last four or five weeks,” Gov. Tate Reeves said in a Tuesday press conference, after the state health department announced 644 new cases that day. “We can celebrate that fact, but we must also realize that the trends will only continue if we do the right things.”
As Gov. Reeves mentioned, the seven-day new case average has dropped by over 30% since peaking in late July. The seven-day average for new tests dropped by 21% in that time.
Mississippi ranks sixth among all states in the seven-day average for positivity rates, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center. The state ranks 20th in new tests per 1,000 people.
When asked about the decline in reported tests, State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said that Mississippians often only get tested when they experience symptoms.
“A lot of people in Mississippi don’t have a primary care doctor, and a lot of people don’t get care unless they’re sick,” Dobbs said. “So the high testing numbers a lot of the time reflect the number of people who are ill and symptomatic.
“So I think it’s a good sign to see the decline in testing demand, that’ll also help with the private lab capacity and their ability to get faster results.”
Dobbs added that the state doesn’t have a set target for the number of new tests, instead focusing on maximizing tests in highly impacted communities. For instance in Holmes County, which has the highest case rate per capita in the state, MSDH tested over 500 people this past weekend in Lexington, or roughly a quarter of the city’s population.
Regionally, counties in Central Mississippi and the Delta continue to have the highest rates of COVID-19 in the state, although some counties in the southern third of the state, especially Claiborne and Wayne counties, also rank highly.
Hospitalizations from the disease have slowed, as the seven-day rolling average has decreased for ten straight days, although patients in ICUs and using ventilators have increased in recent days.
Mississippi Today is pleased to announce Michelle Alexander as Donor Relations Director.
Alexander will lead Mississippi Today’s impact donor fundraising initiatives, working closely with senior leadership to further grow individual investment in our nonprofit newsroom.
“Hiring a Donor Relations Director is a key element of our strategic growth, and we couldn’t be in better hands with Michelle Alexander,” said Mary Margaret White, Mississippi Today CEO & Executive Director. “Michelle intrinsically understands the critical mission of our nonprofit newsroom and brings high-level experience and expertise to our business team.”
Alexander brings 15 years of not-for-profit fundraising experience to Mississippi Today. She has held leadership positions with Children’s of Mississippi, the American Heart Association and JDRF where she was instrumental in philanthropic development, as well as implementing mission-related strategies. In addition, Alexander ran a successful fundraising consulting practice. She has been responsible for securing over $14 million in gifts during her fundraising career and has earned a reputation for professionalism, engagement and an authentic passion for the missions of the organizations she has served.
“I have been fortunate to work in wonderful organizations that strive to improve the lives of others,” said Alexander. “The meaning I find in my work and the opportunity to match a donor’s desire to make a difference with an organizational mission and purpose is extremely important to me. I look forward to accomplishing that type of work at Mississippi Today as we approach journalism in a way that informs and inspires our citizens to expect and learn more in order to achieve progress and positive change.”
Originally from Atlanta, Alexander is a 25-year resident of Jackson, where she relocated after beginning her career in Memphis. She is both a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Fund-Raising Executive.
Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America
Center Hill High School economics teacher Toni Coleman helps her senior class students Elijah Geis, from center left, David Vega and Jonathan Tate with their class project in Olive Branch Tuesday, May 7, 2019.
Lawmakers funded a controversial program for merit teacher pay raises this week without adding any layers of accountability for how the money is spent.
The School Recognition Program gives pay raises to teachers in high performing schools and in the past three fiscal years, districts have received about $71 million from the state.
But a Mississippi Today analysis of the program shows inconsistencies in how districts distribute these funds, with some teachers receiving more than $1,000 and others receiving less than $50 at the same schools. Additionally, school districts receive little or no scrutiny from state leaders in how they dole out the money.
The lack of accountability from the state level is such that a legislative budget staffer, just days before lawmakers met this week to fund the program for next fiscal year, asked a Mississippi Today reporter to share her database that shows how, exactly, the program’s money is spent by school districts.
Created by the Legislature in 2014, the program rewards teachers in school districts that move up a letter grade or maintain an A or B rating. Proponents say the merit pay program is a performance-boosting incentive, but critics say it causes confusion and in some cases actually decreases morale for educators. There are also questions about how the money is distributed to teachers and whether the program is racially equitable.
Gov. Tate Reeves, who considers the program a hallmark of his public education achievements, vetoed portions of the $2.5 billion education budget this year because it did not include funding for the program. He said he held up the budget because teachers would lose out on well-earned pay raises through the program.
“Many of them (teachers) will see pay cuts of a couple thousand dollars,” Reeves said.
But a Mississippi Today analysis shows vast inconsistencies in how school districts distribute the program’s funds. There is little or no state oversight over how individual school districts disburse the money, so the amounts teachers receive vary widely at any given school and district — which directly counters guidance issued by the Mississippi Department of Education.
In 2018 and 2019, the first two years of the program, districts created teacher committees to decide for themselves how to disseminate the funds and to whom. But last year, the MDE issued guidance clarifying that the money should only be awarded to current and certified staff of the eligible school, and that the awards must be distributed evenly. Despite this guidance, not every school district complied, our analysis shows, meaning there is seemingly still no standard for how districts should award the bonuses.
Last year, just 60% of school districts evenly disbursed the money to teachers, and 36% did not. Fewer than 4% of districts did not submit information at all, meaning it’s unclear how the money was distributed.
For example, at Kossuth Middle School in Alcorn County, 32 staff and teachers received $871.34 a piece last year, but five teachers received $108.92 each, according to district response forms.
At Southaven Elementary School in DeSoto County, teachers and staff received a wide range of amounts: 40 of them received $1023.89 each, and the rest ranged below $750. One person received just $18.
At Terry High School in Hinds County, 79 teachers and staff received $938.84 each, and nine received $81.46 each. At George County High School, 87 staff and teachers received $1118.41 each, while one person received $223.64.
Data for the first two years of the program is unavailable because not all districts submitted the proper information to the state.
For years, it remained unclear exactly how many Mississippi teachers received money from the program. The Department of Education does keep records of the amount given to each school and district, but it does not keep records of how that money is distributed at the schools.
Through several public records requests, the department provided Mississippi Today with individual district response forms. Districts submit these response forms, which are often handwritten and not readily available in a spreadsheet, to the state department.
Mississippi Today took that information and created a detailed spreadsheet that showed how many teachers received money from the program. Our analysis showed that in fiscal year 2020, nearly 21,000 certified teachers and staff in more than 500 public schools collectively received $25 million from the program.
On Aug. 7, the Friday before the Legislature returned to the Capitol to address funding for this program and other bills, a legislative budget analyst reached out to Mississippi Today for “detailed information for FY20 showing the number of teachers and number of staff receiving salary supplements at the district and statewide levels. A spreadsheet summarizing this information would be greatly appreciated.”
The staffer said the Mississippi Department of Education could not provide him with that information.
“I contacted the Department of Education and they said they don’t have the number of teachers and staff receiving salary supplements statewide,” the staffer wrote in an email. “They said the information is only available at the district level.”
Mississippi Today provided the Legislative Budget Office with that information on Friday afternoon.
When asked on Monday why lawmakers didn’t previously have that information, House Education Chairman Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, said this was the first he’d heard of lawmakers not having specific numbers for the program.
“We’ve had those numbers,” Bennett said. “This is the first time I’ve heard anything like that. We have the numbers, and we got them from LBO. MDE should have those exact number of teachers as well. But I don’t know what this is about.”
Since state testing was cancelled this spring because of coronavirus school closures, there will not be standardized test grades to create accountability ratings and base the School Recognition Program on for the next fiscal year. Some lawmakers said they hope that time will be spent scrutinizing the program’s fairness and accountability.
“The program takes money away from (the school funding formula), which is a fair and objective formula for all the schools in the state and redirects it to a small number of schools based on standardized test scores,” Blount said. “It provides a financial incentive for teachers to leave underserved schools and move to wealthy districts. It is bad policy.”
Blount said he’s heard stories of teachers who were in the school when it achieved the letter grade needed to qualify for the bonuses that did not later receive the bonus because they left the school by the time they were disbursed two years later. The law has no requirement to pay staff who are no longer employed in the school district.
He also pointed to instances of new teachers receiving the bonuses even though they were not working at the school when the school achieved the score making the teachers eligible for the bonuses.
The bill the Legislature passed Monday evening will fund the program again by pulling $28 million from a capital projects fund to provide merit pay increases to roughly 23,000 teachers in fiscal year 2021.
A lab tech prepares a body for autopsy in the Mississippi Medical Examiner’s office in Pearl.
CLEVELAND — Bolivar County Coroner Rudy Seals is one homicide away from being in an impossible situation.
Like many coroners in the state, Seals is dealing with an increase in COVID-19 related deaths, but doesn’t always have a steady location to store the dead because his office does not have its own morgue.
If people start dying at an even more increased rate than they already are, he could soon find himself collecting a body and not having a place to keep it.
That day could come much sooner if there were to be a homicide or suspicious death in Bolivar County. County coroners are required to send all deceased suspected of wrongful death to the State Medical Examiner’s office for an autopsy, which can take weeks because of how severely understaffed and under-resourced the State Medical Examiner’s office is. While Seals can still find somewhere to store a person’s remains for a few days until they’re buried, he’d be hard-pressed to do the same for weeks.
This is why he’s asking the Bolivar County Board of Supervisors to purchase a holding refrigeration unit as a temporary solution. His long-term plan is to work with the county to build out a permanent facility, “so this will never happen again,” Seals said.
Before the pandemic, he used the morgue at Bolivar County Medical Center or stored the dead at a local private funeral home. He can still do that, but Seals said the Bolivar County Medical Center only has adequate space to store two bodies, and space at the funeral home is limited because of its uptick in private business.
It’s not to the point where bodies are piling up, but Seals said there are “moments in which we cannot store a body because there are bodies already in those [holding] spaces. So what we would have to do is call a local funeral home and ask them to hold that person until another funeral home comes from three or four hours away to pick up a loved one.”
The situation is only exacerbated by the well documented woes of the State Medical Examiner’s office. In 2017, Mississippi Today reported that Mississippi’s Office of the Medical Examiner was more understaffed than any other state medical examiner office in the country.
Seals says he’s getting by right now, but with COVID-19 cases continuing to rise, he’s not counting on it staying that way.
“It leaves the county in a very awkward or uncomfortable position when those people pass away and the hospital cases have already filled up,” Seals said.
Though he hasn’t yet been dealt a homicide, he does have a case that needs to be sent to the State Medical Examiner’s office but can’t get there for weeks because of the state backlog.
“I’m housing [the remains] at a private location. I know that I won’t be able to keep it there for a month because those places are quickly filling up,” he said. “So I’m quite sure that next week I’ll have to go move it to the hospital until the hospital administration begins to ask questions. Then I’ll probably have to move it to continue to keep it. And I don’t think that is fair at all and I think that is sad.”
Heather Burton, the coroner in neighboring Sunflower County, said she didn’t feel like she had the same issues as Bolivar County, but added, “The only place where I could see it becoming a problem is if somebody had to go for an autopsy [at the State Medical Examiner’s Office] and we had to hold them for an amount of time.”
Seals presented his request for a refrigeration unit to the Bolivar County Supervisors on Aug. 3, who in turn expressed support for his plan. County Administrator Will Hooker said the board hasn’t taken official action yet on purchasing the refrigeration unit and is still discussing what the best option would be in terms of which unit to buy.
“We take this very, very seriously and we’ve got to do a better job of accommodating our citizens. I just want to personally tell you that this matter is taken very seriously and we’re going to do everything we can,” Supervisor Jacorius Liner said to Seals at the Aug. 3 meeting.
Supervisors also praised Seals during the meeting for being proactive.
“Well to be honest, if you really look at it, I’m not being proactive,” Seals later said during an interview. “I’m actually operating behind the gun. I’m just blessed that I don’t have any of those [wrongful death] situations.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic drags on, there’s one thing we’re all counting on to rescue us from the drudgery of socially-distanced life: a vaccine.
How many times have you heard “X won’t happen again until there’s a vaccine”? Concerts, conferences, festivals, sporting events, weddings, and anything else that entails a lot of people being in one place has been put on hold indefinitely—and we miss it. All of it.
But as much as we’re counting on a vaccine to put an end to this nightmare, the reality is that even once a fateful scientist, company, or lab does find a vaccine, the story doesn’t end there; the next steps are manufacturing the vaccine at scale, ensuring equitable distribution both between and within countries, and making sure everyone who needs vaccination—billions of people around the world—can access and afford it. We’ve never been faced with a challenge like this, and the way it plays out will speak to our collective compassion and humanity.
An Indian company is getting a jump-start on manufacturing low-cost vaccines. With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Serum Institute of India plans to crank out 100 million doses of Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine for poor countries at a cost of $3 or less per dose. In a separate deal with multinational pharma giant AstraZeneca, which licensed Oxford’s vaccine in late April, the Serum Institute also agreed to produce a billion doses for low- and middle-income countries.
The Serum Institute
The Serum Institute of India isn’t widely known, but as Bill Gates points out in this video from 2012, the company plays a crucial role in global health. As the world’s biggest manufacturer of vaccines by volume (not by revenue—that title goes to British GlaxoSmithKline), Serum makes vaccines for dozens of diseases, including measles, mumps, diptheria, tetanus, and hepatitis-b, among others. According to the company’s website, 65 percent of children in the world receive at least one of its vaccines, and they’re used in over 170 different countries.
Serum was founded in 1966 and is privately owned, which gives it the freedom to make quick, risky decisions that publicly-traded pharma companies can’t; Bloomberg says the company “may be the world’s best hope for producing enough vaccine to end the pandemic.”
The Oxford Vaccine
As detailed in a paper published in The Lancet on July 20, a vaccine developed by researchers at Oxford University showed highly encouraging results in phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. Of 1,077 people that took part in the trials, 90 percent developed antibodies that neutralized Covid-19 after just one vaccine dose.
Its unwieldy name, “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19,” is a mashup of its various attributes: it’s a chimpanzee (Ch) adenovirus-vectored vaccine (Ad) developed at Oxford (Ox). Unlike American company Moderna’s vaccine, which prompts an immune response using Covid-19 messenger RNA, the Oxford vaccine is made from a virus genetically engineered to resemble coronavirus. Scientists used a virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees, and added the spike protein that Covid-19 uses to break into human cells. The resulting virus doesn’t actually cause people to get infected, but it prompts the immune system to launch a defense against it and block it from continuing to invade cells.
The vaccine’s only side effects were headaches and a mild fever. More extensive trials are now being launched in the US (this will be the biggest with 30,000 people), UK, South Africa, and Brazil. The vaccine may be used in controversial human challenge trials as well—this is when vaccinated people are infected with the virus to see whether the vaccine can effectively neutralize it.
Risky Business, Onward
The Serum Institute is taking a pretty big risk by forging ahead with these plans, even outside of the fact that the Oxford vaccine hasn’t yet passed Phase 3 clinical trials. If the vaccine falls through for any reason, Serum stands to lose up to $200 million.
Even once a vaccine (this one or any other) is determined safe, cranked out at lightning speed, and distributed, there’s no guarantee it will eradicate Covid-19. The virus could mutate and develop a new strain. The ultra-accelerated timeline under which vaccines are being developed could leave us with one that’s not truly safe and time-tested. Production constraints and supply hoarding could complicate manufacturing. And according to one study, 50 percent of Americans and more than a quarter of people in France say they don’t even want to be vaccinated.
As Carolyn Johnson wrote in the Washington Post, “The declaration that a vaccine has been shown safe and effective will be a beginning, not the end. Deploying the vaccine to people in the United States and around the world will test and strain distribution networks, the supply chain, public trust and global cooperation. It will take months or, more likely, years to reach enough people to make the world safe.”
Despite these caveats, though, a vaccine is still a finish line we must race towards, and the only logical next step short of letting the virus rage in an attempt to achieve herd immunity. So, fraught as it may be when (or if) it arrives, we’ll keep waiting, hoping, and looking forward to all the things we’re going to do again once there’s a vaccine.
Good Thursday morning everyone! Temperatures are in the mid to upper 70s, under mostly cloudy skies this morning. Low pressure in the area will bring the chance for scattered showers and thunderstorms again today. We need the rain and most everyone will have the chance of getting some today. Patchy fog will be possible this morning, so be careful in your morning commutes. We will see a High near 88. Calm wind becoming south around 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%.
Tonight, A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Otherwise, mostly cloudy, with a low around 72.
Mississippi Today is pleased to announce Michelle Alexander as Donor Relations Director.
