DeSoto County affected by new CDC recommendations

DeSoto County is one of the more than 2,000 counties in the country where the Centers for Disease Control is now recommending that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors, as case numbers blamed on the more contagious Delta variant are rising rapidly.  

The new statement on Tuesday, July 27 from the CDC also recommends indoor mask wearing for all teachers, staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status. The statement did encourage that children “should return to full-time in-person learning in the fall with layered prevention strategies in place.”

The color-coded map on the CDC website indicates the more active locations for coronavirus in the country, and DeSoto County is one of those in the “red zone.” In fact all of Mississippi’s counties, except for seven, are in the “high” category for a substantial level of transmission and would come under the new CDC recommendations.  

Substantial transmission means there’s been 50-100 cases per 100,000 over a seven-day period and high transmission means an area has seen more than 100 cases per capita over a seven-day period.

According to CDC numbers, the seven-day average for cases in DeSoto County is 286, or 143.83 per capita. That is an increase of 111.11 percent from the past week. The 13.7-percent positivity rate is a rise of 4.96 percent.

However, testing volumes are down slightly and new hospital admissions due to COVID-19 are down 4.35 percent over the past seven days. The percentage of ICU beds used for COVID-19 patient numbers in DeSoto County has risen 6.33 percent to just over 21 percent in the past seven days. All of the figures have been trending higher.  

According to the CDC, 39.3 percent of DeSoto County residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Thirty-four percent, or 63,240 county residents, are fully vaccinated. 

Nationally, 56.9 percent of Americans have had at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 49.2 percent of the country is fully vaccinated.  

You can research the numbers on the CDC Data Tracker website.