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.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
A voter walks into Twin Lakes Baptist Church in Madison, Miss., Tuesday, November 5, 2019.
A group of Mississippians filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to ensure Mississippians have the ability to vote absentee in November to avoid exposure to COVID-19.
Most states allow people to vote early in person and by mail, but to do so in Mississippi, voters must provide an excuse, such as being away from home on election. The existing law makes Mississippi one of the most difficult places in the nation to vote early.
Many had suggested Mississippi lawmakers did little this year — relative to efforts in other states around the nation — to ease access to polls during the coronavirus pandemic. But the lawsuit filed on Tuesday argues that the language of a law they passed in June should broadly expand Mississippians’ ability to vote absentee.
“Over the last month, Mississippi has proven to be a consistent COVID-19 hot spot with the numbers of infections and deaths increasing, not decreasing,” said Vangela M. Wade, CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, in a news release. “Any requirement that citizens gather in polling places to cast their ballots would show a callous disregard for the health of our communities that would likely chill the voting process resulting in constructive disenfranchisement of thousands.”
The legislation in question, which has been signed into law by Gov. Tate Reeves, stated that any person under a physician-imposed quarantine related to the coronavirus or who was caring for someone under a physician-imposed quarantine could vote absentee. The quarantine language was an amendment to existing law that allows people to vote absentee if they had “a temporary or permanent disability.”
The lawsuit filed Tuesday argues that the state’s top physician — State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs — has already effectively imposed quarantine by ruling that Mississippians should avoid crowds of more than 10 people, like at crowded polling places.
The lawsuit, filed by the Mississippi Center for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Mississippi on behalf of a group of Mississippians concerned about voter safety, is asking for a judicial ruling on the law passed earlier this year.
“The legislative history of this expansion makes it clear that a ‘physician-imposed quarantine’ does not require a doctor’s guidance given individually to the voter, but would also include guidance from the Mississippi Department of Health, whose director is a physician, and other public health officials and experts who are physicians,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit comes as the issue of early voting and voting by mail has become contentious in the nation, with President Donald Trump voicing opposition. Without providing proof, the president has continually alleged that voting by mail is fraught with fraud.
Presidential elections normally have the highest voter turnout in Mississippi with more than one million people participating. Experts have been predicting an unusually high turnout this year in Mississippi for the election, where former Vice President Joe Biden will challenge Trump.
In Mississippi, incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith faces opposition from Democrat Mike Espy, the former secretary of agriculture.
Existing state law had already included language that allowed people to vote early for a temporary or permanent disability. At one point, Secretary of State Michael Watson, who oversees state elections, said that individual county circuit clerks at their discretion could use the existing language to allow people trying to avoid contracting the coronavirus to vote early.
But after the bill passed, Watson asked for an official opinion from the Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office on whether the language referencing the physician-imposed quarantine would prevent the circuit clerks from using their discretion to allow people to vote early based on a temporary disability. Watson has not yet received a response from Fitch.
House Apportionment and Elections Chair Rep. Jim Beckett, R-Bruce, said it was not his intention when the bill passed the Legislature this year to limit the ability of the circuit clerks to use their discretion.
The lawsuit filed this week contends that state law should give Mississippians trying to avoid contracting the coronavirus the right to vote early.
“This lawsuit makes clear that Mississippi law allows absentee voting for many people during an event like the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Joshua Tom, legal director for the ACLU of Mississippi.
Editor’s note: Vangela M. Wade serves on Mississippi Today’s board of directors.
Magdalin Fulce used to take three different prescription medications for anxiety and depression.
She doesn’t take any now, not because she doesn’t need it, but because she can’t afford it.
Fulce, 24, of Weir lost the Medicaid covering her prescriptions on her 19th birthday. She then signed up for AmBetter through the Affordable Care Act, which again provided coverage. But when she turned in her earnings as a self-employed hairdresser in 2019, she was unable to afford the premiums any longer.
At times, she was paying as much as $100 or $200 for a month’s supply of Valium. So, she stopped taking it.
Fulce got her prescriptions through her primary care physician but believes she needs a psychiatrist’s evaluation. “But I don’t have $400 for a psych workup,” Fulce said.
She has struggled since, she said. “I’ll go three months doing well then maybe three months downhill.”
Four months ago, she overdosed on Klonopin, landing in the mental ward at St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson.
Many families stop buying these types of prescription drugs because of the high cost, said Tandi Karol Weaver Hawthorne, an educator and mental health advocate in Choctaw County.
When her late husband, David, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 1996, she said they paid up to $1,000 a month for his medication. If not for a combination of Medicare, a private drug plan and extended family support, they couldn’t have afforded his medication, she said. Magellan Health Service, a national leader in behavioral health care management, found that mental health drugs now account for a fourth of all pharmacy spending by private insurance and about a third of pharmacy spending by public payers such as Medicaid.
And that number is expected to increase 60% over the coming decade, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services predicted.
In Mississippi, approximately 77,000 Medicaid beneficiaries had behavioral health diagnoses (a number that includes children but not infants) in state fiscal year 2019, according to Matt Westerfield, communication director for Medicaid. The three primary diagnoses are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. “The vast majority of that 77,000 – if not all of them – would be on some form of mental health medication,” Westerfield said.
Not having regular access to medication causes relapse
Availability of medication plays a major role in maintaining mental health, according to the study by the patient advocacy group Mental Health America.
“Sixty-nine percent of patients with medication access problems had adverse events compared to 40% for patients with no access problems,” according to Joyce West, director of the American Psychiatric Research Network.
Of patients with access problems, the studies found:
20% had emergency room visits
11% were hospitalized
23% had side effects significantly worsen—interfering with functioning and outweighing therapeutic benefits
22% had an increase in suicidal ideation or behavior.
15% had an increase in violent ideation or behavior.
3% became homeless for more than 48 hours.
Most patients look first to their insurance companies to provide prescription coverage. Mississippi Insurance Department spokeswoman Beth Reiss said health insurance companies use lists to determine which drugs they will or won’t cover.
Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Mississippi and United Healthcare did not respond to requests for information on how they construct these lists or the prior authorization process, which is how doctors attempt to convince the companies to cover the drugs not on their approved list.
Westerfield said the cost of high-priced drugs shouldn’t affect those on Medicaid.
“For beneficiaries in regular fee-for-service Medicaid, there is a $3 copay for any drug regardless of what medication is prescribed, and children, pregnant women and long-term care residents are exempt from that copay,” he said. “In Medicaid’s managed care program, two of the plans don’t charge beneficiaries a copay for medications, and the third plan charges a $1 copay.”
There is a limit, however, of how many prescriptions Medicaid patients can receive — six. Those under 21 are eligible for more if medication proves necessary.
Pharmacists are ‘a crucial part of the treatment team’
Pharmacists also offer solutions through generic medications as well as transportation and delivery options, said Bob Lomenick, whose pharmacies in Oxford, Holly Springs, and Potts Camp treat more than 3,000 people. “A lot of people are on fixed incomes.”
He said that insurance companies are starting to realize that restricting access to needed medications can be detrimental in the long run. “Payers are finding out that patients that don’t take their medications correctly costs the system a lot of money,” Lomenick said.
New drugs are expensive, Lomenick said, noting that Latuda, a mood stabilizer and anti-psychotic, costs him $41 dollars a dose, while the popular ADHD drug Vyvance costs him $10 a dose. “Those ADD drugs are being used a ton these days—some justified, some not.”
Terence H. Brown, a pharmacist at GAC Community Pharmacy in Canton, said many manufacturers work with patient assistance programs, such as RxAssist, RxHope and GoodRx.
Teresa Parker, compliance director for Region 7 Community Counseling in West Point, says that connecting clients with patient assistance programs is a part of their plans to aid patients in getting their psychiatric medications. “It used to take only five days to be approved,” she said. “Now it takes three months.”
Delays and costs leads some patients to choose pills for physical ailments over mental health medication, she said. “If you rely on a fixed income, any new medicine, even a $60 medicine addition, that money has to come from somewhere.”
Fulce said that something more needs to be done so that mental health patients like her don’t fall between the cracks. “For someone who’s never had a severe mental health issue, they don’t have any understanding of what this is like. It’s not making it day to day—it’s more like minute by minute.”
This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to inform, educate and empower Mississippians in their communities through the use of investigative journalism. Sign up for our newsletter. Email Julie Whitehead at julie.whitehead.mcir@gmail.com.
Teachers monitor students as they walk to their classrooms during the first day of school Cassie White talks to her sixth grade math students during the first day of school at Neshoba County Central Middle School on Wednesday, August 5, 2020.
As most schools reopen this month, a new report shows that children across Mississippi carry more COVID-19 per capita than nearly every other state.
The report shows Mississippi has one of the highest rates of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in the U.S., dovetailing with increased community spread among all age groups and tracking with the state’s overall high infection rate.
After Gov. Tate Reeves allowed most schools to resume as scheduled this month, State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs has reiterated that community spread is the largest indicator of cases among children, adding Mississippians’ adherence to masking, social distancing and avoiding large gatherings will determine how successfully schools reopen.
“If we’re very diligent about this we can make it much more likely that we’ll have a successful school start if there’s less coronavirus in the community,” he said Monday. As of Monday, 34 cases have been associated with school re-openings — 19 among students and 15 employees.
Reeves echoed Dobbs this week, saying Mississippi was at a “critical point” to further control the virus spread, adding the state’s average number of cases has started to decline. Though the average daily cases have dipped below 1,000 for the first time last week since mid-July, the state’s testing has also decreased, netting a still-elevated testing positivity rate — currently at 19% on a weekly rolling average.
Reeves refutes the positivity rate, saying not all clinics report negative results. An accurate number of total tests and the timing of recent tests is crucial to analyzing positivity rate, but that information is lacking in public health department reports.
Still, the state’s daily case rate remains one of the highest in the nation, and Mississippi has the fifth highest rate of cases among children, with nearly 800 cases per 100,000, behind only Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. The average across the U.S. is 447 cases for every 100,000 children. The new report, released by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association this week, shows that the burden among children is more significant than originally thought.
Another metric of the burden of coronavirus among Mississippi kids measures their proportion of the state’s total infections, rather than just per capita. Mississippi has a higher than average percent of COVID-19 cases among children, at 10% of all the state’s cases compared to 9% nationally. Cases among those under the age of 18 have more than doubled in the last month, now accounting for the fastest growing age group for total cases.
Though children tend to not get as sick if they contract the virus, early research is inconclusive about how likely children are to spread it, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Though older children are thought to contract and carry the disease similarly to adults, younger children’s propensity to spread has been less understood. However, recent research suggests young children do carry more of the virus than once thought.
Mississippi Today is pleased to announce Michelle Alexander as Donor Relations Director.
