The Mississippi State Department of Health reported 79 COVID-19 deaths on Dec. 21, topping the previous single-day record of 67 deaths on Aug. 25.
As COVID-19 cases continue to climb and hospital ICU space continues to dwindle, the state’s top health official spoke bluntly about the virus in the state and warned people to limit Christmas and other holiday gatherings this week.
“It’s bad and it’s gonna get worse,” State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said Tuesday in a press conference. “Holidays are weak points for us. We let our guard down, and we allow transmission to occur that doesn’t have to occur.”
Dobbs took time during the press conference to read some information about several of Monday’s reported deaths.
“Eighty-four year old white male. Sixty-seven year-old Black female. Fifty-one year-old white male,” Dobbs said. “… These are people who would be with us for next Christmas, by and large. These are people… they didn’t have to die. If we did a little better, if we collectively were a little better at making sure we didn’t spread COVID, these people would be alive.”
This year, the state has reported 197,691 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 4,490 total deaths. To go along with the 79 deaths on Monday, the state reported 2,191 new COVID-19 cases.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.