COVID-19 can literally choke the life out of an individual by attacking the lungs.
The novel coronavirus is also strangling the economy and killing small businesses as we end another week of a mixture of mandatory and voluntary closures across the state.
Gov. Tate Reeves, last week, provided some relief to small businesses by allowing some retailers to reopen under strict guidelines.
For many, this was welcome news. For others, it was not nearly enough.
Hundreds of people gathered in Jackson last week to protest the restrictions the state government has placed on many businesses, which have caused layoffs and an unprecedented spike in unemployment.
It is very easy to sympathize with individuals whose jobs, livelihood and civil liberties seem to have been placed on the backburner in the name of combating a public health crisis.
These are real people with real jobs, and some have a healthy distrust of government.
As a person who believes we should always question authority and government leaders, it’s also a good exercise to take a step back and examine all of the facts.
The Mississippi State Department of Health has been forthcoming with a lot of data when it comes to the coronavirus, updating most of it on a daily basis.
After over a month of collecting data, we start to see a story take shape in our state, particularly in the Delta, that is disturbing.
All of the local store owners we spoke to this week are taking this virus very seriously, and there’s very good reason for that.
Our local population, particularly African Americans, are susceptible to experiencing the worst outcomes from a virus like COVID-19, mostly due to underlying conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and others.
Indianola native and vitamin D expert Dr. Ray Matthews told us this week that African Americans tend to have 30 percent less vitamin D in their bodies than others who are also deficient.
Matthews said vitamin D can help build up white blood cells that could increase the body’s immunity to viruses like COVID-19.
As of Tuesday, there were 52 reported positive cases of COVID-19 in Sunflower County. Of those, 45 were African American, according to MSDH.
Neighboring Bolivar County had 101 cases, and 79 of those were African American. Of the seven deaths recorded from the virus in that county, six were black.
Leflore County has reported 15 deaths related to COVID-19. All 15 were African American.
Of the 18 cases in Humphreys County, 14 were black. Coahoma had 60 cases and 50 were black.
Washington County had 77 cases, and 62 of those were African Americans.
All three deaths from the coronavirus in Washington County were African American.
It is likely that if schools had remained open, many of our youth would have contracted COVID-19 and would have experienced zero to mild symptoms.
But they would have taken the disease back to their homes, to their ailing parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts.
An unmitigated outbreak could have a devastating effect on the most vulnerable populations.
It’s very healthy for us to have discourse about weighing the effects of the virus versus the devastation of an economic collapse, but all the above data has to be taken into consideration. Those realities cannot be ignored.
We also cannot ignore the warnings from our own local physicians.
These are people we know and trust with our lives on a daily basis.
They are treating this virus with the utmost seriousness, mostly because of the data above. They know just how vulnerable our population is in Sunflower County, and they want to do everything in their power to keep people from dying.
We need to continue to question things, but don’t ignore the answers just because they conflict with a predisposed belief.
