Two months after mask mandate ends, Mississippi sees record ‘uncontrolled spread’ of COVID-19

Since Gov. Tate Reeves lifted a statewide mask mandate two months ago, COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed to record levels in Mississippi, where there is now an “uncontrolled spread” of the disease.

Nearly three times more COVID deaths in Mississippi’s for-profit nursing homes, analysis shows

All of Mississippi’s staff deaths from COVID-19 so far have involved for-profit nursing homes. Twice as many residents also caught the virus there, and nearly three times more died there, an analysis of health data by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting shows.

More Choctaws have died of COVID than those who died of the disease in Hawaii. Or Alaska. Or Wyoming.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the Mississippi Choctaw Band of Indians harder than any major city in the nation — and 10 times harder than the rest of Mississippi.

Holmes County was ‘already off the cliff with no safety net. Then COVID came.’

TCHULA — This small town sits an hour from the suburbs of Mississippi’s capital city of Jackson, but it rests a world away.

As union leaders call for slower line speeds, COVID-19 spreads in Mississippi poultry plants

With workers sick and workforces depleted, two Mississippi poultry plants have permission to ratchet up processing line speeds to increase production during the pandemic — at the risk, union leaders say, of worker safety in one of the country’s most dangerous industries.

‘I just wanted my dad to have a chance’

As darkness descends on her home in Chunky, Marcy Mills reflects on her father’s final days.

“It broke my heart to know he had been in that room, lying there in silence, alone for around 10 days and nights. Can you even begin to imagine what mental torture that must have been?”

This rural Mississippi hospital beat bankruptcy. Can it survive the pandemic?

MAGEE — As Gregg Gibbes walked through the doors of his new hospital in April 2019, he faced a frightening yet all-too-possible future: The facility he had been tasked with leading was at risk of shutting down and taking hundreds of jobs with it, and leaving Simpson County without an essential source of medical care.