Mississippi’s COVID-19 outbreak is being called the worst case scenario.
According to the Daily Beast, 200 people expired from coronavirus, the second highest per capita rate in the country.
Experts say the state’s lack of planning, response, and resources local county coroners has lead to the widespread outbreak and mounting deaths.
“My morgue was completely full all last week,” Panola County Coroner Gracie Gulledge told The Daily Beast. “It’s bad. We’ve only had our cooler full once or twice in the whole time I’ve been in operation, and it’s been 14 years.”
“If the coroners don’t have the resources to pursue the diagnosis or the potential diagnosis of COVID-19 in many of these unattended deaths, then that will undoubtedly lead to an undercount of the actual fatal impact of this pandemic virus,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
The head of Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety, which oversees the State Medical Examiner’s Office says department’s stance of not offering aid to county coroner’s when it comes to investigating and determining if a death was due to COVID-19 needs rethinking.
Test kits are distributed from Jackson on request, but many coroners reported the supplies did not always arrive.
Mississippi medical examiners perform an average of 1500 autopsies a year, mostly comprising accidents and homicides. Now with COVID-19 beginning to pile on the corpses, it can take upwards of three weeks before there is room at the medical examiner’s office to take a body for autopsy.
There are so many bodies in Bolivar County, they’ve started storing bodies in Panola County’s refrigerators.
Bolivar County Coroner Rudy Seals says “This is not getting any better any time soon,” she told The Daily Beast. “If the deaths increase, we’re going to be in trouble.”
Mississippi already has the fewest number of doctors per capita than anywhere in the nation.
And, Mississippi leads the nation in complicating factors of obesity, diabetes and heart disease which can all have very detrimental effects on people suffering from COVID-19.
