For the first two-plus months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunflower County managed to hold its number of positive cases in check.
That has all changed over the past two weeks, as the county’s numbers have seen a spike that is concerning local health officials.
“We are exploding with new cases at the moment,” South Sunflower County Hospital’s Dr. Hannah Ray told The E-T this week.
Ray said between June 15-21, 46 clinic patients tested positive for the coronavirus.
Testing has become much more prevalent over the past few weeks with organizations like Mound Bayou’s Delta Health Center offering free testing in multiple locations.
The 46 positive tests Ray is referring to, however, come from directly from symptomatic patients who have become ill and visited Indianola Family Medical Clinic over the past week.
“If we are testing more, it is because we have more people who meet the profile for testing, which means they are sick, and therefore the disease is more prevalent,” Ray said.
In mid-May, Sunflower County stood at 68 cases, with three deaths related to COVID-19.
On May 29, right around the time the shelter-in-place rules began to loosen, the county had 79 cases.
By June 3, that jumped to 93, and by Monday, the county had 155 positive tests.
The next day, the number jumped to 172, with the county registering its fifth death connected to the virus, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
Ray noted that she believes the data from MSDH are lagging, because the department depends on the entities conducting the tests to report them, so she estimates the number of cases reported for Sunflower County each day are actually higher.
Ray said that hospitalizations related to the virus have also gone up, with SSCH admitting around 10 patients over the past week, she said, with five active patients in-house as of Tuesday.
While those numbers are higher than the previous three months, Ray said the hospital is not anywhere close to capacity when it comes to rooms, and no one was utilizing a ventilator as of Tuesday.
“Most people are requiring supplemental oxygen, which is keeping them from coming home,” Ray said.
Ray said the clinic is seeing more younger people than before contracting the illness, with the youngest patient being in their early 40s.
Ray said the uptick in positive tests seems to have a direct correlation with the end to shelter-in-place measures at the end of May.
“Starting at about the 15th, we were exactly two weeks out from when we loosened the restrictions and people started getting back out in the community and more free in the community and not having as much of a lockdown,” Ray said. “This is actually evidence that the shelter-in-place worked. Our numbers were staying down. Now that we are all back in the community and people are not wearing masks and they are not social distancing and we’re having block parties and all kinds of social gatherings, this is when we’re seeing our cases explode.”
Ray said that most of the virus spread is happening through direct exposure.
“We have to wear masks, and we have to social distance,” she said.
Once exposed to someone who has COVID-19, Ray said the virus can live dormant for 14 days.
The individual may test negative on day three but develop the virus days later.
“Think of it like a countdown clock that starts when you were around that person,” she said. “Any time before that clock hits zero 14 days later, you could develop the virus. If you come and get tested on day three and you’re negative, you’ve still got 11 more days that you could get sick.”
Ray said the best course of action is for those individuals to quarantine, and if they begin showing symptoms, they should go to their doctor for further testing.
In the meantime, those who are still out and about need to adhere to Centers for Disease Control guidelines, Ray said, and those who have tested positive for the virus do not need to be in public.
“This is not something that’s going to go away overnight, so going forward, we’re all going to have to choose what level of risk we’re comfortable with,” Ray said. “For some of us who have more health concerns, it may not be that we want to choose a lower level of risk, but we have to choose to stay inside and quarantine.”
