The president of the Mississippi Hospital Association is predicting that a hesitant Gov. Tate Reeves will eventually order the wearing of facial masks statewide.
“We’re very much in support of having masks mandated across the state,” Tim Moore told the Greenwood Rotary Club Tuesday.
MHA, with more than 100 member hospitals, and other health organizations have been urging Reeves to join more than 20 other states that require the wearing of masks as a way to deter the spread of the new coronavirus.
The Mississippi State Medical Association, which represents more than 5,000 physicians, residents and medical students, on Tuesday issued a statement strongly backing a statewide mandate as a result of the recent surge in COVID-19 cases.
The first-term Republican governor, though, continues to say that while he encourages all Mississippians to wear masks in public places, he only plans to mandate it where rising infection numbers support the action.
On Monday, an order from Reeves took effect that requires people in 13 of the state’s 82 counties to wear masks while in public places and while shopping in local businesses. Several other cities and counties around the state, including Greenwood and Leflore County, have implemented their own mask orders.
According to The Associated Press, the governor said again Tuesday that he has the same goal as the medical community — to get people to wear masks — but that he believes in a different approach.
“Every dentist I know wants 100% compliance for every kid to brush their teeth every single night. Some kids, if you tell them to brush their teeth, they just won’t do it,” the AP quoted Reeves as saying. “It’s just the reality of where we find ourselves. ... Our goal has to be, how do we get the highest number of individuals adhering to wearing a mask when they’re in public?”
Tuesday’s Rotary Club meeting was the first time the Greenwood civic club has gathered since the coronavirus reached the state in mid-March and large social gatherings were discouraged — and then temporarily banned by Reeves.
Only 13 of the club’s members turned out to listen to Moore. The low attendance seemed to counter his concern that too many people in Mississippi have gotten lax about the pandemic. Moore said he has even had to try to dissuade an adult son of the notion that the virus, which has claimed almost 1,300 lives in Mississippi and almost 140,000 nationwide, is not real.
“This is not a hoax,” Moore said.
“We’ve just got to be smart. That’s the only way we are going to fight this thing until a true vaccine comes into play.”
Moore said that although the biggest increase in COVID-19 cases is now coming from young adults, the repercussions of their failure to take the risk seriously are falling most heavily on the older generations, which are most susceptible to bad outcomes from the respiratory disease.
“If you start looking at who went to the hospital now, it wasn’t ... the young men and women from college and high school that were out partying. But they took it home, and they took it to their parents and grandparents or someone else who did wind up in the hospital.”
Moore, a former chief operating officer at Greenwood Leflore Hospital, said the adverse financial impact that COVID-19 has had on hospitals is due partially to some early mistakes in messaging.
“We started communicating if you have symptoms related to COVID, don’t come to the emergency room. Don’t go; call your provider. That was to protect everyone else involved, but the general public saw that as, ‘I don’t need to go up there. I’m likely to get COVID,’” he said.
The association has since been trying to dispel that fear, including launching a marketing campaign under the slogan “We’re Prepared to Care.”
He said that one of the safest places a person can be during the pandemic is “in a hospital or in any other provider’s clinic. And it’s because of all the precautions they’re taking to make sure you don’t get sick or their staff doesn’t get sick.”
The costs of treating COVID-19 and the loss of patient volume have combined to strap Mississippi’s hospitals, which need altogether nearly $700 million a month to operate, according to Moore.
Federal relief payments totaling $736 million to the state’s hospitals have been a big help, he said. So has an $80 million slice from the state Legislature of its federal COVID-19 money.
Still, the assistance will only buy so much time if the virus explodes again in the fall, as some health experts are predicting, he said.
“If this thing comes back again, we’re going to have to have some help.”
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
