Greenwood and Leflore County officials have said that they will consider implementing new mask mandates after the Mississippi State Department of Health’s latest guidance recommended that all Mississippians, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
Ronnie Stevenson, president of Greenwood’s City Council, said Wednesday that there are no immediate plans to reinstate a mandate, but the council might discuss such a move at its meeting Tuesday.
A city mask mandate that was first implemented last summer was allowed to expire June 15. Stevenson said he still advocated that residents wear masks.
Leflore County District 5 Supervisor Robert Collins, who is also the board’s vice president, said of a countywide mask mandate, “I never wanted to lift it the first time. I think we need a mandate.”
On June 21, Collins and District 3’s Anjuan Brown voted against lifting a county mandate also imposed last year. District 2’s Reginald Moore, District 1’s Sam Abraham and District 4’s Eric Mitchell voted to lift it.
Collins said he would bring up a mask requirement during a future meeting if he can secure enough votes to ensure its passage. “We’re playing with something deadly. We need to put the mask mandate back on,” he said.
The state Health Department’s recommendation, which was issued Wednesday during a Zoom press conference with reporters, is more stringent than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated guidance released Tuesday, which states that fully vaccinated Americans wear masks in indoor settings in areas with high COVID-19 transmission rates — those with more than 50 new infections per 100,000 residents over the past week.
For the week ending Tuesday, Leflore County averaged about 17 cases per 100,000 residents, according to the latest data tracked by the Brown School of Public Health.
The CDC’s newest guidance reverses the recommendation it issued in mid-May, stating that those who had been fully vaccinated did not need to wear masks in most settings, whether they were indoors or outdoors.
The delta variant of COVID-19 has led to a surge in cases and hospitalizations from the respiratory disease across the country, including Mississippi.
“As you guys know, we are seeing a really phenomenal increase in the state of Mississippi,” Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the state’s health officer, told reporters Wednesday.
A “grim combination of low-level immunity in our population combined with the delta variant” has been the cause of this surge, and a majority of the transmission of cases stem from unvaccinated people, he said.
Dr. Paul Byers, the state’s epidemiologist, said that 96% of COVID-19 cases and 88% of those who are hospitalized due to the virus are unvaccinated.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said Tuesday that scientific evidence indicates that vaccinated people can be infected with the virus and thereby transmit it to other others.
It is unclear if any COVID-19 patients at Greenwood Leflore Hospital have the delta strain of the virus, which Byers has said has become the predominant strain in the state.
As of Wednesday morning, the Greenwood hospital was treating two patients for COVID-19.
Sandy Fink, an infection prevention nurse at the hospital, said in an email that the tests it conducts on patients to determine whether they have COVID-19 do not specify whether they have the delta variant.
“We do not routinely test for the strain as that is a send-out test, so we have had none confirmed here at Greenwood Leflore Hospital,” she said.
Fink would not say whether the county or the city should reimplement a mask mandate but did emphasize that the hospital still requires all employees, patients and visitors to wear masks.
“The best protection from all current strains of COVID is vaccination,” Fink said.
- Contact Gerard Edic at 581-7239 or gedic@gwcommonwealth.com.
