Mississippi is one of five states where the Delta variant of COVID could have the worst impact, according to the Centers for Disease Control. During an interview on The Gallo Show earlier this week, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs warned this strain is more contagious.
“We do have a lot of different variants. There’s a handful that we think are variants of concern,” Dobbs told us. “The U.K. variant has been our dominant strain. But this week, the Delta strain has become the dominant strain of Coronavirus in Mississippi.”
Mississippi is particularly vulnerable to the Delta variant because of our low vaccination rate. And Dobbs told us they’re seeing outbreaks among school-aged children, with more than 80% of those occurring in the Jackson metro area. “The way that these viruses work is when they reproduce themselves they’re error prone in how they do it. Sometimes there’s random changes that happen just through dumb luck that happen to be more potent,” Dobbs explained. So the more Coronavirus is out there, the more likely we are to see these random mutations that lead to these dangerous variants.
