Reuters, Washington
The crush of new Covid-19 infections in Mississippi has become so dire that the state has turned to efforts reminiscent of the earliest days of the United States pandemic, when a field hospital was set up in New York's Central Park and a medical ship was moored in the Hudson River.
With an overload of coronavirus patients and a shortage of healthcare workers in the state, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) opened up a 20-bed field hospital in its parking garage on Friday morning.
It plans to open a mobile hospital tent early next week, staffed by a medical team sent by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The hospital opened a similar triage centre in its parking garage in the spring of last year.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said that the federal government had denied his state's request for the same US Navy hospital ship - the USNS Comfort - that docked in Manhattan in March last year to relieve hospitals of their Covid-19 patient burden.
At the time, New York was the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the US. "The ask for the ship was as much about the over 500 personnel that come with it as it was about the actual physical facility," Mr Reeves said at a news conference on Friday (Aug13).
He said he welcomed any of those federal medical workers to Mississippi, but like many of his fellow Republicans, also vowed never to force people to wear masks, which are known to be an effective defence against the spread of the coronavirus.
"I believe every individual ought to make what they believe to be the best decision for themselves," he said.
Mr Reeves told reporters that he and his family had been vaccinated but said there were "risks" associated with both getting vaccinated and remaining unvaccinated.
Low vaccination rates and the more infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus have driven a surge of Covid-19 cases across the country, overwhelming some state medical systems.
It is also sending more children to hospital.
On Friday, there were 1,871 pediatric patients hospitalised across the United States, according to CDC data, more than at any other time in the pandemic.
Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oregon have reported record numbers of overall Covid-19 hospitalisations this month, according to a Reuters tally, stretching intensive care units near capacity and forcing states to seek medical aid from the federal government.
Republican governors in southern states such as Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates and threatened to withhold funding from schools that impose them, however. The White House is considering reimbursing school officials who lose pay from flouting the ban.
The number of daily cases across the country has doubled in the last two weeks, according to a Reuters tally, reaching a six-month peak, while the average number of daily deaths has increased 85 per cent in the last 14 days.
