Governor Reeves has extended his safe return order and added Forrest County to his mask order. The City of Hattiesburg’s Executive Order 2020-13 has also been signed to reflect those changes.
Hospitalizations/ICU
Between our two hospitals, there are 79 COVID-positive patients in the hospital, with 36 of them in ICU. There are 26 patients under investigation.
New positive cases over the weekend
Forrest County
7/18 – (-22)
7/19 – 21
7/20 – 36
The (-22) for Forrest County on Saturday was likely due to a data reconciliation at the state level. At several points throughout this pandemic, addresses have been attributed to Forrest County that were really in Lamar County, Perry County or sometimes in Stone County. Our Forrest County Emergency Management District reported these to MSDH and reconciled locally with the Lamar County Emergency Management District. However, when these decreases in overall cases appear for Forrest County (this has happened twice before) – accompanied by a larger than normal increase for Lamar County (see below) – that is what is happening.
New positive cases over the weekend
Lamar County
7/18 – 57
7/19 – 13
7/20 – 35
The three-day total of new positive cases in the metro area was 140.
Total positive cases
Forrest County – 1197
Lamar County – 807
Total metro area – 2004
5-day average
Forrest County – 18.4
Lamar County – 36.4
Total metro area – 54.8
New positive cases reported in the past 14 days
Forrest County – 319
Lamar County – 342
Total metro area – 661
One tool that was debuted late last week from the Mississippi State Department of Health is weekly profiles of local county data. You can access this by going to this link: https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/31,0,420.html and clicking on a county.
Another MSDH tool is seeing the ranking of counties based on incidences of new positive cases over a 7-day period. You can access that by clicking here: https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/8634.pdf