Gov. Reeves announces mask mandate for 9 counties
October 19, 2020, The Clarion Ledger, Keisha Rowe – Gov. Tate Reeves announced Monday that a mask mandate will be reinstated for nine counties in an effort to combat the rise of COVID-19 cases in the state. The following counties will be under the mandate. View Story.
Millions more virus rapid tests, but are results reported?
October 18, 2020, Modern Healthcare, Associated Press – After struggling to ramp up coronavirus testing, the U.S. can now screen several million people daily, thanks to a growing supply of rapid tests. But the boom comes with a new challenge: keeping track of the results. All U.S. testing sites are legally required to report their results, positive and negative, to public health agencies. But state health officials say many rapid tests are going unreported, which means some new COVID-19 infections may not be counted. View Story.
State health officials tell Congress they need $8.4B for COVID-19 vaccination effort
October 16, 2020, The Hill, Peter Sullivan – State public health officials are urging Congress to provide at least $8.4 billion in emergency funding for distributing a coronavirus vaccine, warning that they do not currently have enough money to carry out the immense logistical effort. The letter to bipartisan congressional leaders came from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), a group that represents state public health departments, and the Association of Immunization Managers (AIM), which represents states’ vaccination officials. While much attention has been placed on the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, there is also the daunting challenge of distributing that vaccine and getting shots into the arms of more than 300 million people in the United States. View Story.
What's Coming This Winter? Here's How Many More Could Die In The Pandemic
October 16, 2020, NPR, Will Stone – Coronavirus cases are rising rapidly in many states as the U.S. heads into the winter months. And forecasters predict staggering growth in infections and deaths if current trends continue. It’s exactly the kind of scenario that public health experts have long warned could be in store for the country, if it did not aggressively tamp down on infections over the summer.”We were really hoping to crater the cases in preparation for a bad winter,” says Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University. “We’ve done basically the opposite.” After hitting an all-time high in July, cases did drop significantly, but the U.S. never reached a level where the public health system could truly get a handle on the outbreak. Now infections are on the rise again. View Story.
New study spotlights childhood obesity and possible risks for coronavirus
October 16, 2020, MPB News, Desare Frazier – Twenty-two percent of children ages 10 to 17 in Mississippi are obese according to Jamie Bussel. She’s with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which just released the study. She says the data reviewed is from 2018 and 19. Bussel says this year, researchers are concerned that obese children are at a greater risk of contracting the coronavirus and suffering more severe symptoms just like obese adults. “There are certainly a lot of hypotheses being made by the experts around the impact of the COVID pandemic on childhood obesity prevalence rates but it’s going to take some time before we can actually do that and attribute it,” said Bussel. View Story.