Even though he recently allowed Mississippi to become the first state to relinquish its mask mandate, Governor Tate Reeves has a message for Mississippians.
Important to remember that COVID-19 is not gone! We’ve seen numbers increase over the past few weeks. Please stay watchful and protect yourself. We want to be cautious and limited in using executive action—we’re counting on the people of Mississippi to be wise and careful!
— Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) October 15, 2020
The Twitter post comes after Thursday’s COVID-19 case report from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which was the largest one-day rise since August 19th.
Just this past Monday, two weeks since the expiration of the statewide mask mandate, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs warned that we may be heading into a second phase of the pandemic.
“I’m actually very concerned that we are going into a phase,” Dr. Dobbs said. “It’s kind of like reading the stock market sometimes. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, but we do have some indicators and all of the indicators are moving in the wrong direction. We have hospitalizations up, cases are up, deaths are not really up so much, but we always know that lags and we know that our COVID-like illness indicators are up. The last time we saw that was before the summer surge.”
As he has throughout the course of the pandemic, Dobbs also continued to encourage people to take the precautionary actions necessary, such as social distancing and wearing a mask when in public—with or without executive direction.
“It’s such an easy thing, and it adds benefit to our safety. It allows us to keep schools open, allows us to keep hospitals from overflowing and it allows us to visit people in nursing homes,” he said.
